Addendum

Just keeping the blog active...

C.A.T.S.

Photocopied pamphlet (x 500) later found amongst the papers of Renton Twain, BSc (Hull):

MANIFESTO OF THE C.A.T.S. (Coalition Against The Slow)

Dear Friends of Efficiency,

It may surprise you to learn that for many years now, the speed of your day-to-day lives has been subject to the whims and fancies of a Top Secret Government Agency known as the Department Of Greater Speed. This body is composed of some of the Commonwealth’s most brilliant minds and talented physicists, and was established by the Duke of York himself with the noble aim of subtlely and secretly influencing British society to the effect that our culture, our leisure and our industry should move, operate and progress at the greatest possible velocity.

But, my friends, I am sorry to relate to you that this same Department has itself been far from speedy in carrying out the magnanimous duty with which it was originally charged. Sitting in their comfy offices, shut away from our fine society and ignorant to the needs of today, they content themselves with popularising ready meals, Smart Cars and iPods, all of which they believe to be incredible advances in convenience and efficiency.

Pah!

They are fools!

FOOLS!

Have they never experienced the irritation of having to cut open a film lid and stir after just three minutes? Have they never been boxed into the slow lane of the A12 on account of a convoy of ‘fun-loving’ Smart Cars driven by a series of tossers? Have they never been stuck behind some trendy youth walking painfully slowly along the pavement, who cannot hear the impatient tuts and sighs of the person behind them because they are too busy listening to Kid ‘n’ Play on their ‘Nano’? Who thought of that name anyway? Pah! To ‘Nano’ I say ‘No no’! Ha ha!

I thought of that myself.

One would be forgiven for assuming that when such obvious flaws are pointed out to the DOGS by a true genius such as, for the sake of argument, me, then they would immediately heed his words and listen to his own, far better plans for the acceleration of our great Commonwealth. One would think that they would straightways bestow upon him a generous research grant, a state-of-the-art laboratory and a zones one-to-six travelcard. But no! Even as an employee of the Department myself, my reward for forward thinking was nowt but a P45 in a fortune cookie!

Since that fateful day, the DOGS have continued to fritter taxpayers’ money away on ridiculous notions which serve only to impede this country’s rightful progress. I, meanwhile, have devoted countless hours to developing and perfecting the ideas which the DOGS saw fit to spurn. Funded by nothing but my earnings from the weekend shift at Argos, I have drawn up proposals for a range of necessarily drastic measures including:

1) Wider, three-lane escalators in tube stations and shopping centres. The only thing more aggravating than some idiot standing on the left of the escalator (traditionally reserved for those walking up) is someone walking up the left hand side too bloody slowly. The addition of a third lane, with a minimum speed of eight miles per hour, should resolve this problem.

2) Motorway-style lanes to be painted on to pavements and pedestrianised areas. Similar to above. Just as lorries and caravans are forbidden from entering the fast lane on a motorway, so should a considerable chunk of walking space be free from anyone elderly, baggage-laden, sightseeing, lost, confused, high-heeled, stunty-legged or otherwise tardy. Packs of shambling youths also to be banned. From cities. Smokers too. Except for pipes. Pipes are fine.

3) Revocation of the OAP Turbo. This short-sighted measure was initiated in the early 1980s by the DOGS with the aiming of increasing the speed of that most interminably ponderous strata of British society: the elderly. But under-funded development caused fatal malfunctions in the system, with the result that the aged are now fast enough to dart in front of more able-bodied people at supermarket checkouts, train doors, escalators etc, but slower than ever at proceeding once they’ve got in these people’s way. It is clear that the whole system should be scrapped; in its place I propose compulsory euthenasia at sixty-five. No, sixty-two.

4) The use of a giant, super-powered turbine to warp gravity, destabilise the space-time continuum and set in motion the disintegration of a causality web which will accelerate the entire universe to ten, maybe eleven times its current velocity. This procedure will be completely safe and poses absolutely no danger to the fragile fabric of this dimension.

And so we come to the crux of my letter. For while my giant super-powered turbine has been researched on a shoestring budget, its actual manufacture will require a degree of external funding. To this end, I seek a sponsor – and you, friend, have been hand-picked by me from a list of thousands in the Yellow Pages, selected according to the strictest criteria to be invited to invest in my glorious dream for the future of Brittania and her Commonwealth.

‘But wait,’ I hear you cry. ‘What’s in it for me?’ Well, aside from the worldwide renown and eternal fame granted to those who bring about a new Golden Age, you also work in an industry poised to benefit greatly from my research. I’m talking turbines here. You see where I’m coming from now? In return for your sponsorship, I can guarantee you exclusive access to the most advanced, the most powerful, the most hygienic hand drying technology ever conceived by mortal mind. Only God Himself, and possibly Jesus, have ever conceived finer, and I doubt they ever actually built it. I’m going to build it. And you can have it. Can you really afford to let such an opportunity pass you by? By funding my device you will be securing both your place in the history books and your dominance of public lavatories across the entire globe!

Subscribe today and you will also receive this charming carriage clock.

So don’t waste a minute more. Send cheques, cash or credit card details immediately to:

[Twain’s lower ground studio flat somewhere in west London]

-------ENDS-------

This photocopied sheet (I later discovered) was sent to various luminaries in the British hand dryer industry. Most of them saw fit to throw it straight at the bin; some of them never received it from their PAs, who knew a piece of junkmail when they saw it; a couple sent it to Private Eye. But one saw in it a great business opportunity – because he saw great business opportunities everywhere he looked.

Jonathan ‘Opportunity’ Knox was Essex’s foremost entrepreneur. There seemed nary a hare-brained scheme or madcap plot that he couldn’t transform from a sitcom episode into a highly profitable venture. You know those decorative miniature pub signs you see for sale in London markets? They were his idea. Adult baby-grows? Him. Hubcaps? Him again.

Opportunity Knox had even signed up to an email scam he received one day from an exiled African prince who was having to smuggle his vast fortune out of the country through foreign bank accounts, and promised fantastic royalties to anyone who forwarded him their account details to help him do this. It is estimated that every day £200,000 worldwide is lost from this swindle. Opportunity Knox somehow managed to make half a million, and now plays golf with the African prince.

Oh, and he also owned the world’s largest hand dryer manufacturer, BlowKnox.

It was on the profits from all these many successful businesses that Knox had bought his immodest mansion, Fort Knox, in Essex’s wealthy district of Smashing. Once a small weaving village atop a politely wooded hill, the area had in recent years been infected by the nouveau riche who found it was conveniently close enough to London to expedite the daily commute to their unregistered offices, but far enough into the Essex hinterland to provide them with the requisite space to park their two-miles-to-the-gallon four-by-fours, which were of course entirely necessary for their five-foot-two-inch wives to drive their brattish toddlers to the local private school fifty metres away. Thus the pleasant wood was now soutured by countless intersecting veins of tarmac and punctured by a rash of unsightly villas, whose giant black iron gates and mock-Tudor framework and garden jacuzzis and automatic garage doors displayed their owners’ wealth in a way that good taste simply can’t manage.

The village used to be known as Woodhillfieldbridgebrookriverhampton-on-sea, but the new inhabitants quickly realised that this was taking far too long for their chauffeurs to type into their sat-navs, so they changed it to Smashing. They also twinned themselves with Los Angeles, California (the mayoral office of LA had never actually replied to their letter, but the residents of Smashing hadn’t made their fortunes without knowing a trick or two and the enclosed contract had contained a clause stating that failure to reply would constitute a binding agreement).

And the biggest of all the mansions, the one with the tallest gates, the most Mocking Tudor framework, the deepest jacuzzi and the most automatic garage door, was beyond any shadow of a doubt Fort Knox. The place was truly horrific, and that was without a small war taking place on the gravel driveway.

It was just past ten o’clock in the morning, the day was grey and damp, and the legions of BlowKnox employees were drawn up in a defensive square around their master’s house. From behind makeshift barricades of trellis fencing and childrens’ climbing frames, they loosed off jets of super-heated air from curious tube-like weapons held in their arms – like smaller versions of the ones we’d seen on the giant metal monster.

Coming at them from all sides were relentless waves of paper towel manufacturers. They were without Advanced Technology to help them, but they were armed with something much greater: true dedication to their cause, genuine love for their employers, and a satisfactory pension plan. Plus a paper towel can give you a nasty cut if wielded in the right way. These men had worked with paper towels all day, every day for most of their lives; they knew how to hold them, and they carried whole reams upon their backs. Here lay a hand-dryer employee clutching desperately at his bleeding jugular; here another lamenting his neatly severed arm.

The carnage was terrible, and without respite. Yet a paper towel is a naturally combustible item, and for every hand dryer employee ripped to shreds by the onslaught, a paper towel employee was likewise immolated by the jets of blistering air; consumed in the flames of his own weapon.

The fighting was fierce, the fighting was dread, the fighting was getting neither side anywhere. Doctor and I leant on the bonnet of his borrowed saloon, parked a safe fifty metres away, and scratched our chins thoughtfully. Journalists ran past us, helicopters hovered overhead. Boswell had wandered off for a poo.

‘Tricky,’ grumbled Doctor. ‘I’d bet my hat the Yawn of Time is in that house somewhere. But we’ll never get past all that nasty warfare business without being sliced to ribbons or burnt to a crisp.’

‘Or both,’ I suggested. ‘It’s funny, you’d have thought the police would have moved in and broken it up by now. They must surely know what to do.’

I turned around to where the police were standing, another twenty metres back from us. They shrugged.

Doctor tutted. ‘Perhaps it is a job for the army. Can’t they handle a situation like this?’

I turned around to where the army were standing, another twenty metres back from the police. They shrugged also.

‘Never mind,’ said Doctor. ‘I have a better plan. Hop back in the car. We’ll pick up the TARDIS from your place and teleport straight in there.’

I whistled for Boswell and he reappeared from wherever it was he’d run off to. He was carrying a disembodied hand between his jaws.

Soon enough we were back at my flat, which for some unknown reason had a blue police box blocking access to the washing machine. This I took to be the TARDIS.

‘Why does it look like that?’ I asked.

‘Her chameleonic circuitry got stuck while I was visiting mid-twentieth century England one time,’ Doctor explained, then whispered to me, ‘Actually, I got the circuits fixed recently but haven’t had the heart to use them yet. I’ve grown quite fond of this look.’

Doctor stepped up to the machine and brushed some mildew off the sides.

‘Honestly,’ he sighed. ‘I leave her here five minutes and she’s rotting already. Your flat really is in a shocking condition.’

‘I don’t think it’s so bad,’ I sniffed.

‘There are hairs in the plughole.’

‘Everyone gets hairs in the plughole.’

‘Not in the kitchen.’

‘Oh, don’t they now? Then where do they shave their legs?’

Doctor didn’t bother to reply to this. He busied himself fumbling around with some keys, and let us into the TARDIS.

I could describe at length how wonderous the inside of the TARDIS was, but you’ve all seen it on telly and I’ve waffled far too much already.

Instead, let us watch Doctor fiddling with the controls, pulling switches, bashing buttons, twiddling dials, drinking tea, kicking Boswell. Let us listen to the noise like a broken Morris Minor in an aircraft hanger, which builds and builds and then fades away to nothing. And finally, join Doctor, Boswell and me as we step out of the TARDIS again, not back into my flat, but into the bedroom of Jonathan Knox – right in the very centre of his house.

All in a day’s work, noble reader. All in a day’s work.

It was a big, pink, chintzy room with big, dark wooden cabinets and a huge great four-poster bed in the middle, draped with heavy purple curtains. Bad prints of bad paintings of pleasant country scenes adorned the walls, along with at least five full-length mirrors and numerous framed photographs of Knox shaking hands with an array of minor celebrities.

Outside, battle was raging. They were screams, explosions and helicopters. Bits of people flew past the windows. But the noise was muffled in here. In here, all was still.

I didn’t move.

Boswell didn’t move.

Doctor didn’t move.

And the giant metal monster didn’t move.

It just stood there, by the bed, looking at us in some disbelief. A ten-foot-tall chrome humanoid, its armour glistening beneath the 100w bulbs of the glass chandelier which dangled from the ceiling. Its arms still ended in what looked like rocket jets but which I knew now to be the world’s most powerful hand dryers; and for the first time I could now see its face clearly. Or rather, I couldn’t. Its head was just a featureless chrome cylinder, the only face apparent in it the reflection of my own. Yet I got the distinct impression it was scowling at me.

We seemed to have interrupted it pairing its socks.

‘Bugger,’ said Doctor at length.

‘Bugger Indeed,’ replied the monster. ‘What Are You Doing In My Bedroom?’

His bedroom?, I thought. Then is this terrifying being – this distortion of a man – this abomination of science – could it be – could it be…

‘J-Jonathan Knox?’ I stammered.

The monster did not move. ‘That Is The Name Of The One Who Is Contained Beneath This Armour,’ it said. ‘But Mr Twain Has Bestowed Upon Me This Suit, That I May Rule The Hand-Drying Industry By Surpassing My Previously Puny Human Form. I Have A New Name Now. I Am… The Toastmaster!’

And with that he raised both his arms from the bed and charged towards us. Before Doctor and I could dive for safety, each of us had been hit squarely in the chest by one of his steel fists and were now pinned by them to the side of the TARDIS.

Boswell barked and snapped, but couldn’t get close enough without getting within stamping range of the Toastmaster’s big metal feet. For our part, Doctor and I flailed and kicked like our lives depended on it (which it did), but it was all in vain. The Toastmaster was too strong; even the strongest blow I could inflict on his arms did nothing but make a clang like a funereal bell.

‘Spies!’ he snorted. ‘Working For The Paper Towels, Are You Not? Ha Ha Ha! By Such Treachery You Have Just Signed Your Own Death Warrant. In Your Own Blood. Using A Pen Whittled From Your Own Tibia. And Witnessed By… You!’

‘Wait! You have to listen to us!’ Doctor croaked. The Toastmaster tilted his cylindrical, featureless head. ‘Twain is using you,’ continued Doctor. ‘His promises of power are just a way to get your help in his own ill-fated plans! By aiding him you are only aiding the destruction of civilisation! Please, you have to listen to us!’

The Toastmaster seemed to spend a few moments considering this, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘The Toastmaster Will Hear Your Pleas. Andrea!’ he turned to his PA, whom I hadn’t noticed sitting in the corner before. ‘Enter Them Into The Book Of Pleas!’ Andrea made a few scribbled notes in a filofax, then left the room. ‘The Toastmaster Will Consider Your Pleas In His Plea-Considering Hour,’ continued the Toastmaster, ‘Which Is Scheduled For Tuesday Week. Until then… You Must Die!’

With a thrust of his great arms he winded the pair of us. It was much how I imagine it feels to be caught in the path of a bobsleigh. While Doctor and I stood gasping, the Toastmaster took a step back and casually tossed some ham and chives at our faces.

‘Farmhouse special,’ he mused, and held his dryers poised an inch or two in front of our noses. I still have no idea where he was getting all these ingredients from. At that precise point in time, paralysed and breathless and masked with chives, I wasn’t really concentrating.

The Toastmaster’s shoulders convulsed. Arcane symbols glowed on his armour, steam screamed through vents and cracks, eldritch energies surged along hitherto invisible channels and converged, amassed, seethed towards the monstrous hand dryers. We could feel them getting hotter, feel the devil’s breath as it singed our eyebrows, hear the roar as ten-thousand gallons of compressed, super-heated air scorched towards our faces-

I took one last quick glimpse at Doctor. I suppose I hoped he would return me a comforting look of his own. But he didn’t look at me; he was looking at something on the side of the Toastmaster’s left hand dryer.

‘To dry face,’ Doctor read from a little sticker, ‘press here.’

‘What?’

I looked on the dryer aimed at me, and it had the same sticker. Next to it was a little finger-shaped indentation in the chrome.

‘No! Don’t Do That!’

Doctor and I pressed on the indentations. The hand dryers, in accordance with their design, swivelled round on the Toastmaster’s wrists and aimed themselves squarely at his featureless metal face.

‘Oh Boll-'

The Toastmaster tried to move his arms away, but it was too late. The two jets of blistering hot air burst forth from the dryers, unstoppable, relentless; the fiend’s metal head was consumed in a cleansing white heat until it glowed like a child’s lantern; the whole of his ten-foot armoured frame convulsed horribly; from beneath the roar of the dryers there welled up the most terrible of inhuman screams, a tortured, lingering wail which seemed to gnaw at my very soul, hanging in the air for an impossibly long time before finally, mercifully, bubbling away to nothing, to serenity, to oblivion. The hand dryers stopped, and all was silence.

The Toastmaster toppled backwards.

That was quite loud.

By the time I had pulled myself together, got my breath back, brushed the chives off etc., Doctor was already skipping up to the monster’s corpse and poking it inquisitively.

‘Dual-turbine atomic disruptors,’ he mumbled. ‘I didn’t think Earth had these for another fifty years at least. Looks like this Twain fellow’s even cleverer than I thought. Either that, or, well…’ He trailed off into his own private reverie.

‘Poor Knox,’ I sighed. I’d never really felt much sympathy for anyone before, let alone megalomaniacal nouveau riche businessmen who’d just tried to fricassee me with a bionic suit of Advanced Technology. But looking at ‘him’ lying there, with Boswell weeing up his fallen carcass, it all seemed like such a waste. Just think what great things I could have done with that suit.

I looked at the Toastmaster’s face. The once-smooth metal cylinder had melted and wrapped itself around Knox’s contorted features; in cooling it had set into a grim death mask, a gargoyle of blackened, steaming chrome.

Doctor shrugged. ‘Boil in the bag.’

A particularly loud explosion somewhere in the back garden shook us back to the here and now. Outside, the battle was still raging; inside, we still had to find and foil Twain. Find and Foil. I decided that would be a good motto for an action-adventurer.

Now, where might someone keep a giant turbine? In the biggest room, surely.

‘To the en-suite bathroom!’ cried Doctor, and bounded off towards a white door on the other side of the bed, his long grey coat barely able to keep up with him. Following its example, I too flapped about a short distance behind.

On the other side of the door (which Doctor proceeded to open as casually as if he simply wished to use the bidet) was, as predicted, the en suite. And, as furthermore predicted, it was vast. It was a great big lilac tiled affair, with pink marbled flooring and frosted windows that began at waist level and continued up almost to the ceiling, a distant thing which after a hot bath would probably be entirely hidden in steam. The room was furnished with a granite-effect sink big enough to drown a man in, a luxurious white hot tub on brass lion’s feet which was the size of a small swimming pool, a heated towel rack that could have doubled up as the climbing bars for a school gymnasium, and a tremendous turbine jet-engine thingy that might, just might, destroy civilisation as we know it.

‘The Yawn of Time,’ gasped Doctor.

The more I gazed at it the more I realised that it looked, to all intents and purposes, like a really big hand dryer; that is to say, a really big hand dryer lying on its back. It was the same combination of an oblong white structure surmounted by a shining metal funnel; it was plugged in to the electric shaver socket above the sink; it even had a great big silver starter button next to the funnel on top of the white unit (which was, needless to say, possibly the most tempting thing I have ever seen). The only difference was that the funnel in this instance was more of a tunnel, its diameter large enough for an elephant to walk through; and the button, which faced upwards and was the size of a manhole cover, looked like it would require a man to jump on it with all his weight to set it off. The main white unit, for its part, could have housed a family of four; though apart from the funnel and the button it was pretty much unadorned, save for a flimsy metal staircase on one side which led from the tiled bathroom floor up to the top of the unit.

Standing on the top step, in a cowl with the hood back, was Renton Twain.

In truth I was slightly disappointed. I’d been hoping for a dramatic twisty bit where the cowled man drew back his hood to reveal that he wasn’t in fact Twain at all, but I suppose you can’t have everything. He looked slightly older than he did in that video of Mastermind, but he spoke, just as he had done back in the ice-cream van, in italics.

‘DOGS, I presume?’ He looked at us with an air of contemptuous authority as his words echoed around the tiled expanse. It didn’t look like we’d interrupted him doing anything in particular, indeed he didn’t appear to have reacted at all to the fracas we’d just been causing in the bedroom. It was almost as if he’d been expecting us. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’ Well I never.

Doctor peered up at Twain defiantly, but said nothing. I couldn’t think of anything better to do, so I remained silent as well.

‘No doubt,’ Twain went on, ‘you hope to scupper my plans before my genius shows your Department up for the fraudsters you are. Well gentlemen, I am afraid you are too late. The DOGS shall fall and the CATS shall supercede them. Nothing now can stop my hypodrive!’

‘Hypodrive?’ asked Doctor. ‘What is that?’

Twain seemed amused by this enquiry, and glad of an excuse to explain his marvel to our petty little minds. ‘What is it? My good man, it is the key to all the problems the DOGS have spent so long failing to solve! You are familiar, I presume, with the concept of a hyPERdrive? An engine, usually a propulsion engine of some sort, operating at many times what might be considered the ‘normal’ speed. Conversely, then, a hyPOdrive operates at many times below the normal speed. Many, many, many times below normal speed. So slowly in fact that it actually goes… backwards!

‘With this device I will create a gravitational pull large enough to send the Earth into orbit around itself, and in doing so wildly accelerate the movement of time on its surface!

‘Believe me, this’ll work. I saw it on the Discovery Channel.’

Doctor looked to be having none of it. ‘You must stop this madness!’ he demanded. ‘Sir, you are running pell-mell with the scissors of fate!’

This seemed to amuse Twain even more. His grinned widely. ‘Oh, of that I have no doubt, Doctor.’

His words hung in the air for a moment, bouncing from surface to surface. I turned to Doctor and asked, ‘How does he know your name?’

Doctor appeared as unsettled as me; he fidgeted with his fedora. ‘I… I haven’t the foggiest,’ he said.

‘In time,’ Twain waffled on, ‘you will learn just how beneficial I really am to your existence. For all I know, you already do. But enough enigmas! Tremble now, before the glory that is the hypodrive!'

He raised his foot above the big silver button and prepared to bring it down. There was no way Doctor or I could get to him in time to stop him.

But there was something else in Twain’s way. Something was already sitting on the button, though not with enough weight to push it down. The something was small and furry and growling. The something was Boswell, and he was baring his teeth.

‘What? I recognise you! You’re the mongrel who-'

Twain never finished his sentence, or at least he only finished it with a series of yelps and yowls as Boswell leapt for his throat. The pair became a tumbleweed of snapping jaws, flailing limbs and shredded cowl.

‘Good boy Boswell! You get him! You get him good!’ I pelted up the metal staircase to assist my stealthy canine assassin friend. Doctor, for some reason, didn’t move. He just stood and gazed at the curious scene as if in a trance.

By the time I reached the top of the staircase, however, I could see my help wasn’t going to be needed. Grappling with Boswell, Twain had staggered backwards to the very edge of the hypodrive; now he was stumbling; now one foot could find no hold; now he was gone!

Down he tumbled, full fifteen feet, with a blood-curdling cry that reverberated in sickening stereo around the en suite bathroom. Twain hit the pink marbled floor head first, cushioning the landing for Boswell whose jaws were still clamped about his throat. Realising that his work here was done, Boswell hopped neatly off of Twain’s lifeless body and cocked his leg up the evil genius’s corpse.

I peered down at all this from on top of the hypodrive. ‘Well,’ I shrugged, ‘I guess cats don’t always land on their feet.’

This stunning one-liner was lost on Doctor, who didn’t seem to be listening. He was standing and scratching his head, much as he had been doing for the whole scene.

‘Erm… Doctor?’ I asked. ‘Doctor, shouldn’t we be destroying this machine so that nobody else can use it to inadvertently wipe out the future of mankind?’

Doctor blinked and shook his head, as if coming out of some reverie or other. ‘Um. Yes. Yes, I suppose so,’ he said. ‘Let me just… erm… I mean, this will require my trusty sonic screwdriver. Which…’ – he made a show of fumbling around in the many pockets of his long coat and linen suit – ‘…which I appear to have left in the TARDIS. Give me two seconds, I’ll be right back.’

Before I could say anything, he had skipped out of the door and back into the bedroom. For reasons I could not ascertain, he shut the door behind him. This obstruction meant that I couldn’t be entirely sure whether the noise I heard a few moments later was the noise of the TARDIS disappearing, or not.

I looked down at Boswell. Boswell looked back up at me. With that special bond that comes between loving master and faithful hound, I could tell that neither of us had a clue what was going on.

A couple of seconds later I heard the TARDIS reappear again, or maybe not. A few seconds after that the door opened and Doctor strode back in.

‘Got it,’ he said, brandishing the sonic screwdriver. His voice seemed unusually thin.

‘Okay,’ I replied. ‘Let’s get to work.’

‘Let us indeed.’ Doctor waved the sonic screwdriver in the general direction of the hypodrive. He only did this for a short moment, and when he had finished I couldn’t perceive any difference.

‘Erm… is that it?’ I asked.

‘That is it,’ nodded Doctor. ‘I’ve deactivated the, the, the central, the central fugal generator. All you need to do now to completely mash up the insides is tread on that big silver button.’

I looked down at the big silver button at my feet. It was so finely polished I could see my face in it. It made me look fat.

‘This one?’ I shouted. ‘You mean the big silver button which Twain was about to press in order to activate the hypodrive, create the Yawn of Time and destroy life as we know it?’

‘Yes, that one,’ Doctor huffed impatiently. ‘Don’t worry. It’s quite safe now. It will only destroy the hypodrive.’

I looked at the button. I looked at Doctor. I looked at the button. I looked at Doctor. Boswell looked at the bidet. But that is by the by.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘What?’ Doctor gestured frantically. ‘But you must! All of civilisation is at stake!’

‘No.’ I folded my arms.

‘What on Earth’s got into you? Why are you hesitating?’

‘Because,’ I replied, ‘I could very well ask what’s got into you. You’ve been acting very oddly since we got in here.’

‘I’m frightened.’

‘And I thought I heard you leave and come back in the TARDIS just now.’

‘I was coughing. The tiles in here, they amplify things.’

‘And you never explained how the dwarves in Hangnail obtained Advanced Technology when you own the only example.’

‘Evidently I was mistaken.’

‘And when you left this room a minute ago you were clean shaven. Now you have a beard.’

On this matter Doctor was silent for a short while. Then, ‘Bugger. I knew I’d forgotten something.’ He walked up to the staircase and began to ascend, his leather shoes striking one metal step after another, signalling his approach with a baleful toll.

I kept my feet firmly away from the big silver button. ‘You haven’t deactivated anything at all, have you?’ I said. ‘If I tread on this button, the hypodrive will work just as Twain planned. You… you’re helping him! You’re helping to destroy the future!’

Doctor reached the top of stairs and stalked towards me, the sonic screwdriver aimed at my heart.

‘This was not my intention from the start,’ he said in a decidely darker tone of voice than I’d heard him use all night. ‘Even an hour ago, I had no idea of my true role in events. But as we drove here after our discussion with Bob and Trellick at MI5, I realised, as you just pointed out, that we had left one aspect uncovered: to wit, how did Twain supply the dwarves with a TARDIS? To my knowledge – and my knowledge is extensive – the only one in existence is my own. This led me to presume that Twain could only have obtained the TARDIS from me – no doubt some time in the future, when I must have travelled back in time to just before the events we are now witnessing.

‘But I didn’t believe one lone scientist could wrest my beloved vessel from me by force, so again I could only presume that I gave it to him willingly. Why would I do this, I wondered? I must have had a very good reason to do so, for as I believe I mentioned just now, I am possessed of a quite overwhelming intellect and have a very good reason for everything I do. And running through the possibilities, I was struck by the quite horrifying notion that maybe it was in my interests for Twain to succeed. That is to say, after defeating Twain I would regret doing so and go back in time to give him some advantage that might stop my former self from having defeated him in the first place.

‘But what could drive me to such lengths? What could I possibly gain from unleashing the Yawn of Time? Luckily it was quite a long drive here, so I had time to work it out.

‘I’m bored.

‘I’ve been around a very, very long time. I’ve visited every era of every civilisation that ever was, and several of those that weren’t. I’ve met all the most important figures in history, and slept on most of their sofas. All this time I have imposed on myself the strictest rules with regard to altering events. I may intervene here and there, throw my weight in when I can see others need my help, but I have never, ever tampered with the flow of time itself – not on purpose, at any rate. Too dangerous by half. When I visited the thirty-eighth century last week, and saw the effects of the Yawn of Time, my reaction was one of abject horror. Here, in the complete destruction of human civilisation, were laid out before me the terrible effects of meddling with the time-stream. I vowed to hunt down the culprit and rectify matters.

‘Yet this morning, as I sat in the front seat of that Earth saloon car, trundling past your streetlamps and your Starbucks and your Natwest and your bus stops and your Daily Mail and your sports-casual and your Crazy Frog and your umbrellas, I suddenly realised why a Time Lord like me might just wish to wipe it all out. I’ve seen this universe from every direction, every angle, every side. I’ve been everywhere, done everything, got all the t-shirts. My thirst for exploration has been limitless, and not an atom has escaped my enrapt attention. But while my enthusiasm is infinite, the universe is not. After all these years I know it like the back of my hand, and it seems small to me now. Everything is known, and once known it becomes mundane. The black holes of Andewarr and the ice cities of Commel’ch-Hat-Fthar hold no more appeal for me than a grande Americano with milk. The complete reversal of civilisation, then, would not be destruction – not for me. On the contrary, it would be creation. The creation of a whole new universe, a whole new future, to replace the one of which I have grown so weary. A whole new universe for me to explore!

‘This thought frightened me. At first I could not admit to myself that it might be true, and I persevered in our plan to prevent the Yawn. But after we killed Twain and stood on the brink of dismantling his hypodrive, I decided that this was an opportunity I could not miss. Under the pretence of having mislaid my sonic screwdriver, I ran back to the TARDIS in Knox’s bedroom and took the liberty of travelling back to three weeks ago. There I made some enquiries and eventually managed to track down Twain while he was still gathering support for his schemes.

‘I told him I was an another former employee of the DOGS, who had seen his blueprints for the hypodrive and wanted to give him my full support. I said I would lend him my own invention, the TARDIS, to help him. I’d used its chameleonic circuits to make it look like an ice-cream van, and parked it nearby. I also warned him that a bearded man and I would turn up to thwart him shortly before he activated his device, but that he should just act normal at this point and it would all be okay.

‘Of course, in order to get the TARDIS back again I had to hang around for three weeks and eventually make my way to Hangnail for last night. After I’d seen the pair of us leave the ice-cream van, I snuck into the driving seat, dropped the dwarf off at his bungalow, returned all the dogs to their owners, turned the TARDIS back into a police box and came back here.’

Now, I don’t know about you but all that made perfect sense to me. Only one thing confused me. ‘What I don’t get,’ I said, ‘is what you’ve actually achieved by all this palaver. Lending the TARDIS to Twain didn’t do any good – the dwarves didn’t kidnap the DOGS like they were supposed to, and you knew that would be the case. You could have just stayed here and let Twain start the hypodrive himself.’

Doctor shook his head. ‘No. If I hadn’t gone back in time and left such big fat clues for myself, then it would never have occurred to me to question whether the Yawn of Time was a bad thing. You and I would have defeated Twain and that would have been it. My errand just now was not for Twain’s sake, but for mine.’

One day, people will read my action-adventure expositions and compare them to Pynchon.

So, on that bombshell, Doctor and I were left standing on top of the hypodrive: me guarding the big silver button, he pointing a sonic screwdriver at me – which though small, could no doubt give some serious Advanced Alien Grief to my insides. I was hoping Boswell might leap to the rescue again, but he was licking out the inside of the bidet and not paying an awful lot of attention.

‘Now, press the button!’ urged the bearded Doctor. ‘Or I microwave your heart!’ Honestly, I was having serious doubts about his future as my Assistant.

‘I will do no such thing!’ I protested. This may seem heroic, but don’t worry – it was purely self-motivated. I could either be definitely eviscerated by the sands of time, or probably cooked by an alien. And only the second option had the potential for getting me coverage in the Essex Chronicle. ‘It would appear,’ I continued, ‘that we have reached an impasse.’

‘Not really,’ shrugged Doctor. ‘I’ll just kill you and tread on the button myself.’

‘There is that,’ I concurred. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘You will do no such thing!’ yelled Twain.

Doctor and I both span round to face the staircase. Since I had been facing the staircase in the first place, I had to spin a full circle. But it looked good.

Twain was standing there, looking not very dead at all. He had a bad crick in his neck, but nothing worse.

‘I will permit neither of you to steal my glory!’ he barked, and before either Doctor or I could give any notable reaction he leapt between us and landed with both feet on the big silver button. It sunk down with an irresistible shhhhhhhuup.

The hypodrive stirred into life. It started with a faint hum in its very centre, audible through the funnel; this rapidly built to a distinctive swishing noise, accompanied by a gentle rocking motion; this in turn gave way to a thumping roar which shook the whole unit, the whole room, the whole house with terrible force. Doctor and I both lost our footing and found ourselves clinging on to any edge we could as the movement threatened to fling us off the machine; Twain simply rolled around beside the button, laughing hysterically.

Boswell continued to drink from the bidet.

From the funnel there came what felt at first to be a blast of air, swirling and eddying around the room; but as the roar from the unit intensified further still, becoming now a high-pitched whine that stabbed at the eardrums like Lucifer banging on the gates of Heaven, a curious sensation swept over me. It was as if the funnel ceased to discharge air, and instead began to spew forth an unstoppable torrent of time.

I was just searching for the words to describe exactly what I meant by this, when I realised that the hypodrive was acting rather like a washing machine – the faster it span (or rather, the faster it span more slowly) – the less pronounced the shaking became, until it was little more than a vibration. Soon enough all three of us were able to stand up again.

‘You know,’ said Doctor. ‘I’m beginning to think this wasn’t such a good idea after all.’

Renton Twain, meanwhile, threw his hands up in the air and danced a triumphant jig. ‘I have done it! I have done it! I can feel the floww of timme accelerating arrround mee! Tthhee wwoorrrllldddd… ggetttinnnggg ffffaaaasssssttterrrrrrr… fffffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssssss…’

And there he stopped. Not just stopped talking – stopped altogether. Stopped moving. Stopped breathing. Stopped thinking. He was frozen, like a statue, mid-jig.

The hypodrive continued to run, but quieter now. It seemed to have found its pace.

‘Lawks,’ I said. ‘What on earth just happened?’

‘I can’t say I know for sure,’ replied Doctor, straightening out his suit until it was only as crumpled as it had been before. ‘But it would appear that the hypodrive’s power has been compromised somehow. The entire universe has been accelerated, but not to any dangerous level. Furthermore, the cyclone of time it produced seems to have had an ‘eye’ at its centre, rather like the eye of a hurricane, where its effects were not felt. A small space just above its main turbine, where Twain happened to be standing.’

I gazed in bewilderment at the Twain statue before me. ‘You mean he’s still going at normal speed, and the whole of the rest of the universe is going much faster?’

‘Precisely,’ nodded Doctor. ‘Of course, we don’t feel the effects of going so fast because everything’s relative. But to Twain, the entire world has become a blinding blur; and to us, he’s become a statue.’

‘Lawks,’ I said again. ‘But what could disrupt the machine like that? Neither of us touched it.’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ replied Doctor. ‘Maybe it received a nasty jolt, or perhaps there was a power surge. Or maybe some kind of liquid got into it, but I don’t see how that could have happened when-‘

We became suddenly aware of a scraping noise on the marble floor down below. Looking over the edge of the hypodrive, we saw Boswell kicking his back legs along the ground.

This is what dogs do when they’ve just been weeing up something.

‘That’s my boy!’ I grinned. Turning away, I walked up to Twain. ‘Well, at least he got what he wanted. He could still get eternal fame, too. We could donate him to Madame Tussaud’s.’ I prodded him inquisitively in the forehead.

And then I screamed, because my hand went straight through his head and out the other side. I ran down the steps and began washing my gory hands in the sink.

‘That’s the bidet,’ said Doctor.

I ran away from the bidet and began washing my gory hands in the sink.

‘What happened?’ I yammered. ‘I barely touched him!’

‘Not from our perspective, maybe,’ said Doctor. ‘But as far as Twain is concerned, your fist just flew at him at about, ooh, three million times the speed of sound.’

‘Oh, okay. I think we’d better go now, before the police arrive.’

‘I would have to agree with you on that one,’ Doctor nodded sagely.

I read in the Mid-Essex Herald that when the police, the armed forces and Jonathan Knox’s family finally reached the master bedroom and the en-suite bathroom, it was decided that Knox and Twain had killed each other and no other suspects were being sought. Which works out rather nicely for me, considering I killed both of them. The police also switched off the hypodrive, which in line with the Doctor’s theory had no ostensible effect other than to make Twain’s corpse easier to move.

Furthermore, the hand dryers and the paper towels were convinced to stop fighting each other by a special delegation from the soap dispenser industry, and now all three are working together to promote combination hand-washer-dryers like you get in Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Doctor dropped me off at my flat with Boswell. We did the usual fond-farewell-nice-working-with-you-must-stay-in-touch routine, with all the customary insincerity.

‘Erm… listen,’ Doctor said as I shook his hand. ‘About the whole pointing-a-lethal-weapon-at-your-heart-and-forcing-you-to-destroy-civilisation thing…’

I put up my hands placatingly. ‘Think nothing of it,’ I assured him.

‘Thanks,’ smiled Doctor. ‘I’d been up all night, I was tired and grumpy, and I’d been in Essex for ages.’

I know how it is – a man can be so awed by Essex’s boundless beauty that he quite loses all sense of reason.

Doctor knelt down and patted Boswell on the head. ‘Good work back there, old chap,’ he said. ‘You’re the finest Chihuahua this side of Alpha Centauri.’

‘Ain’t nothing but a thang,’ replied Boswell.

Just before the Doctor left, I asked him to tie up one loose end. He had seen the future laid waste by the Yawn of Time – did this mean such a disaster might still happen, even though we had prevented it today?

Doctor smiled. ‘There are some things even I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Like where all a man’s left socks go or how to open milk cartons without spilling the stuff everywhere. But, as with all these things, I look forward to finding out!’ And with that he tipped his battered fedora at me, gave me a wink from beneath that mop of strawberry-blond hair, and withdrew into the TARDIS. As he turned around, I caught the most fleeting glimpse of a blueprint for a hypodrive sticking out of his coat pocket.

‘Well,’ I said to Boswell when the TARDIS had disappeared. ‘I don’t know about you, but I fancy a 99p Fisherman’s Pie. Three minutes, agitate gently, two minutes, serve. Et voila.’

But Boswell didn’t reply. He was in his little bed, fast asleep.

THE END

…….

I have some news.

I am going on sabbatical.

Not retiring – sabbatical. Just a break. Don’t know for how long. Could be a month, could be a year. According to certain schools I pretty much take a sabbatical between every post, so who knows.

But I have things to do, people to stalk, film lids to pierce; and while the continuing support of my noble reader(s) has been ever a boon, all this investigating and action-adventuring is taking its toll on a man in the prime of his life. And if you want to see what kind of an empty, soulless husk could be left over if I keep going at this rate, you might do worse than look here. And bring a sickbag.

So talk amongst yourselves, I may be some time. But if you remember one thing of me, remember this.

There are some who say my writings are not art, for they contain nothing of life. To these critics I put the simple question: what is life, if not a succession of poorly contrived puns linked by a flimsy and implausible plot?

I’ll see you on The Late Review.

CCK 16th April 2006

It's All So Clear Now

If you’ve never been to London before, don’t panic – the MI5 building is very easy to find. Just hop on a train to London (there’s one every half hour or so, Monday to Saturday), and from the station turn left. Head down the High Street, turn right just after Woolworths, carry straight on across the bridge, and it’s the monolothic Aztec temple made of granite and emeralds and surmounted with occult iconography on your left.

Now, as has previously been noted in these pages, MI5 are one of a smattering of secret societies (yes they are) whose job it is to protect the interests of Her Majesty’s Sizable Dominion: this comprising of the Commonwealth, the Secret British Empire, the Dark Side of the Moon and, as of last Tuesday’s invasion, the Magical Kingdom of Zob. Other such organisations include the Lizard Men, the Ash-karr, E.M.V., ‘Erratus’, Julian Cope, and the Mormons. While nowhere near as famous or romanticised as MI5, these other secret societies are all significantly better at the ‘secret’ bit, insofar as they are nowhere near as famous or romanticised.

But none of them have a great big f***-off scary-ass HQ on the banks of the Thames, either.

The society’s first managing director was its founder, Abraham Gilbert MI5 Esq. He established a small cobblers called MI5 & Sons Ltd with his two young lads William MI5 and Thomas MI5, in 1813 at Brent Cross shopping centre. The shop prospered for many years, but when supermarkets started to drive the small independent traders out of business in the 1970’s, MI5’s owner (then one Peregrin Phelps) was forced to diversify and offer more services in order to survive. Spotting a gap in the market, he began to operate as a secret society, and cobblers.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Or at least conjecture.

The current head of MI5 – and this too has been covered before in my reports – was a chap called Bob Hamper. Bob’s identity was so tightly guarded that even he didn’t realise that he was the boss, and was instead under the impression that he was just the bloke who made the sandwiches for the board meetings. Damn good sandwiches, but sandwiches none the less.

Every now and then, important agents in black suits would come down to Bob’s kitchen in basement level five. Bob would stop halfway through the salmon and cream cheese on wholegrain, scrape the butter off the knife back into the tub, turn down Heart 106.2 on the radio even though they were playing that new Shakira song he quite liked, and listen intently as the black suits asked him his opinion on various matters of international espionage and diplomacy. All purely fictitious, of course. They were just making idle chit-chat before ordering another round of BLTs. But whatever Bob suggested they do – even with his customary proviso that he was just the sandwich maker and it was none of his business really – whatever he suggested, they did. And it always worked out right, without fail. The Commonwealth and the Secret British Empire and the Dark Side of the Moon and, as of last Tuesday’s revolution, the Magical Kingdom of Zob, were safe once more. The French would never defeat us!

Plus they were very good BLTs.

Thus it was that world peace and natural order and British Supremacy were all smoothly maintained until one day, not long after dawn on a wet Monday morning, just as Bob got into work for the early shift, he received a visit from an old friend. Usually it was just the black suits who came down to see Bob, but very occasionally this other bloke appeared. A bloke with whom Bob had quite a good rapport, even though the bloke had never quite explained who he was, and didn’t support West Ham. A bloke who would appear at random, from out of nowhere, ask the most baffling of questions, then disappear as suddenly as he had appeared. Then re-appear, pick up the crumpled fedora he’d left on the table, apologise and disappear again.

We drove all the way from Hangnail to London through the early hours of the morning, or rather we sat in the car and slept while the car was steered by that clever little purple-and-silver thingummy (Doctor referred to it at one point as a ‘sonic screwdriver’, but this was too fanciful a name for my tastes). Doctor put the front seat right back and snored on it with his fedora pulled down low over his face. I lay across the back seat, one hand on my chest and the other resting gently on the head of my loyal, recently-rescued canine companion Boswell, who was snuggled up in the footwell.

Before you ask, I did consider writing a paragraph or two about my emotional reunion with Boswell. I did consider cataloguing the entire panaroma of feelings which consumed me like a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the iMax, as finally I gazed once more into his little brown eyes and hugged his scruffy coat. But then I supposed you could guess all this without me going into boring detail, which is something I do enough of anyway, and in any case it didn’t gel with the desired tone of my action-adventure (which is, as you’ll have noticed, mercilessly gritty and bitingly concise), and it was also spoiled slightly by Boswell humping Doctor’s leg all the way back to the car.

When we finally got to London we came off the ring road and parked in the pay-and-display outside MI5 headquarters. Doctor and I were still fast asleep after all last night’s exertions, but Boswell woke us up by barking at a young person in a hoody with a iPod listening to R’n’B (of whom there are many in London). I pulled myself groggily from the saloon’s comfy seats and with Boswell at my heel I trudged after Doctor, as he bounded over a pelican crossing and up the front steps of the MI5 building.

There were some men in black uniforms on the door who pointed some machine guns at us. Doctor said a few words I didn’t catch, and they parted to let us through with a little salute. Before I knew quite what was going on, we were being ushered through a warren of dull little corridors by a lady called Pam.

Pam was the second-in-command at MI5. They obviously held Doctor in great esteem here to have her greet him personally. She was a short, stubby, middle-aged lady with gigantic hair and half-moon spectacles, who wore a black skirt suit cut so sharp that as she toddled along ahead of us she looked a bit like a monochrome Rubik’s cube being shuffled by a bear cub sitting on top of it. It wasn’t an analogy I got to make often.

Of course, like everything around her, Pam’s identity was kept strictly confidential. In fact it was kept so confidential that she didn’t realise that she wasn’t actually the second-in-command at MI5 at all, but just the tea-lady. Every day some of the black suits would come up to her swanky office on the twenty-third floor and consult with her on important matters of international espionage and diplomacy, then ask for tea and coffee for thirteen down in boardroom five. And Pam would wonder why nobody hired a tea-lady around here, but anyway she’d make the tea just this once because she was nice like that and the men in black suits always asked very politely and had been brought up to be good boys.

Don’t ask me how I know all this.

(I read it in Readers’ Digest.)

Anyway, fifteen minutes later Pam had deposited us in the deepest, darkest, dingiest corner of the building, wherein dwelled Bob. His kitchen was a small, cramped, hot, messy, uncomfortable affair, the second such kitchen I’d had the pleasure of inhabiting these past six hours. Thankfully this one was devoid of char-grilled dwarfs.

We entered to find Bob leaning against the worktop and reading The Sun. When he saw us he put the paper aside and walked over to the door with a great grin on his face. He and Doctor shook hands warmly, reciting the usual old-friend spiel about how long it had been and how they hadn’t changed a bit and how they really should stay in touch more. Doctor introduced Bob and me to each to other and then we all sat down at a humble old wooden table, our elbows jostling for room with the jars and the pots and the slices and the chopping boards and the crumbs and the butter knives and the Edam wedges and a quantity of wayward dijonnaise.

‘Well, this is a nice surprise,’ opened Bob. He was a short, stocky chap with no neck to speak of; middle-aged, with what little hair remained cropped almost to oblivion; but with a warm, unassuming face. ‘What brings you down here, then?’

‘Why, the lure of your coronation chicken ciabatta,’ replied Doctor. ‘As ever. I caught a whiff of its unmistakable tang the very moment I entered the building. The finest in all of London town, they say. At all the most fashionable bistros they talk of it in hushed, awed whispers.’

‘Coronation chicken ciabatta, coming up.’ Bob set to work clearing a space on the cluttered work surface and cluttering it up again with clutter that was more relevant to the task at hand.

Without looking up from the ciabatta he was slicing in half, Bob asked me what I was after. I said a bacon and egg toastie would be most welcome, and Bob said excellent choice, he’d be positively delighted to make one of those, rarely got asked for them, black suits were too afraid of getting yolk on their expensive dry-clean-only trousers.

(My trousers are machine washable.)

Bob even found a pig’s trotter for Boswell to gnaw on. I found myself taking to this man very well indeed.

Doctor told Bob that these sandwiches were to go on Pam’s executive budget as usual, that we were just taking a quick break from a very important meeting with her, the content of which was of course utterly confidential and it would be well above his station to even glimpse the agenda through five sheets of frosted glass, but just making purely speculative conversation what would Bob do if a Top Secret Government Agency were being targeted by a ruthless and sadistic superhuman killer with rocket jets for hands?

Bob put the butter knife down for a second and had a think.

‘I can’t say I know much about Top Secret Government Agencies,’ he muttered finally. ‘Only what I read in The Sun, or see on The Discovery Channel, or what the blokes in black suits sometimes talk about while I’m heating their focaccias. I suppose it would depend on which Top Secret Government Agency it was.’

Doctor went all serious all of a sudden and frowned at Bob with a grave, grave countenance.

‘Dogs,’ he said.

Now, the gravity of this was somewhat lost on me. I was not aware that the canine population of Britain were a Top Secret Government Agency. And hadn’t the cowled chap in the ice-cream van been upset that his mercenary dwarfs had captured dogs? Bob looked equally puzzled. Unless, of course… of course! The dwarf we’d encountered had mentioned-

‘The other dogs,’ finished Doctor. And Bob and I clicked at exactly the same time. Well, I say clicked. I didn’t actually know who these other dogs were yet. Bob seemed to though, so I decided to let him and Doctor do all the exposition while I just listened and tried not appear foolish.

‘You mean the Department Of Greater Speed?’ asked Bob. D.O.G.S. An acronym. Now I see. Saw, rather.

‘The very ones,’ nodded Doctor. He recounted, briefly, the evidence of our experience in Hangnail. The tall cowled man who had once worked for DOGS before being been booted out; the trio of Klingon dwarfs he had hired to kidnap his former colleagues; the mechanical giant with rocket hands who had exacted the cowled man’s vengeance for the dwarfs’ mistake; the cowled man’s talk of a great scheme that would put DOGS to shame.

Bob seemed confused. ‘But what would anyone have against the Department Of Greater Speed?’ he gaped. ‘Without them – bearing in mind I’m no expert, but without them, the Commonwealth and the Secret British Empire and the Dark Side of the Moon and, as of last Tuesday’s merger, the Magical Kingdom of Zob, would all ground to a halt! It’s DOGS who work tirelessly to ensure that all Her Maj’s subjects are kept moving as quickly as possible, the better to increase our efficiency and productivity! It’s DOGS who use ultrasound to wake us up ten minutes before our alarm clocks go off! DOGS who wrote the rules about walking up the left hand side of the escalator! DOGS who drive right up your arse on a single carriageway! DOGS who patented Nike Air trainers! DOGS who first put wheels on old people’s tartan trolleys! You wipe out DOGS, then British Supremacy is… is…’

‘Fucked,’ I concluded.

‘Right,’ said Bob, and handed me the swear box.

Doctor leant back back on his chair and steepled his fingers, appearing very solemn but clearly enjoying the sensation of Bob and I waiting on tenterhooks for his educated opinion. When he could savour the moment no longer without looking smug, he asked if he could speak with whoever headed DOGS up these days.

Bob scratched his head. ‘I read somewhere it’s a bloke called Trellick. Sejanus Trellick, that’s the one. Well, I can’t make any promises, I mean I just make the sandwiches around here, but let me see if I can sweet-talk Pam into getting him down here. Might be a while – DOGS aren’t based in this building, they’re in another office just down the river. In Battersea.’

It didn’t take all that long. Bob left the kitchen, Bob returned, and Doctor and I were just polishing off our wonderful sandwiches when the door flew open and the space it had vacated was filled by a great bear of a man in a white shirt and khaki suit. His blue eyes could have punctured a tyre at fifty paces, his nose appeared to have been broken several times, and his blond bearded chin was like a breezeblock covered by a welcome mat. The whole adventurous package was framed somewhat incongruously by a mane of beautifully kept, long blond hair.

Boswell darted behind my chair with a whimper. Bob looked forlornly at a shelf of pickles scattered by the crash of the door.

‘Who’s after my boys, then?’ boomed the blond man in a boisterous baritone. This in place of ‘Hello’.

‘Sejanus Trellick,’ smiled Doctor. ‘I believe we’ve met before. Your department and I unravelled the parallax scandal of 1994, did we not?’

Trellick stopped, stared, then grinned, a big, toothy grin amongst all that beard. ‘By Jupiter we did!’ he laughed. ‘Doctor, my good man, how’ve you been?’

‘I’- Doctor began.

‘Wait!’ Trellick interrupted. ‘Where are my manners? One question at a time, Trellick, one question at a time. Before I ask how you are, which to be frank I can tell by your appearance anyway, I must first seek an answer to my first and decidedly more pressing enquiry. Just which impertinent blighter would dare disgrace the Department Of Greater Speed?’

‘That is precisely what I was hoping you would be able to tell us,’ replied Doctor. ‘The blackguard claims he was a former employee of the Department, until being fired at the 1997 Christmas party.’

This statement seemed to rile Trellick immensely. Without a word he stormed over to the table, swept away a whole brie with a flick of his mighty hand, and replaced it with a laptop computer which he pulled from somewhere within the folds of his expansive khaki jacket. Booting it up, he hammered at the keyboard with log-like fingers and muttered to himself beneath the beard.

‘Balderdash! It can’t be! Not him. Not that fruitcake. He could never muster the nerve to commit such an incursion! Never!’

None of us were really sure if Trellick was expecting a reply to all that, so we kept quiet while his typing buckled the keyboard. I couldn’t see what he was doing until at length he spun the computer round to face Doctor, Bob and me. On the screen was a freeze frame of Magnus Magnusson.

‘Behold,’ announced Trellick. ‘The moment a man’s mind is irrevocably wrecked. Seldom is such tragedy captured on camera, let alone broadcast to a prime-time BBC1 audience of five million. But perhaps in this case, that was the very problem…’

And on that enigmatic note he reached over, tapped a key or two as lightly as his build would allow, and finally stood back to let us watch the events on screen.

It was a digitised video clip of Mastermind. In the top right of the screen was a little watermark reading ‘D.O.G.S. Archive Footage’, though why a Top Secret Government Agency would preserve this programme I’d really no idea. I asked Doctor if he knew.

‘Shhh!’ he hissed. ‘Keep watching and we’ll see, won’t we?’

Magnus Magnusson was reading out the answers to some questions which a contestant had just got wrong in their specialist round, the Life and Times of Walter Sickert. Now and then the camera showed the contestant sitting in the Hot Seat, mentally kicking himself as each answer was given. He was a thin little man, whose clothes and haircut allowed me to date the video to around the turn of the 1990’s. Finally Magnusson announced the contestant’s score in that round and the contestant walked off to the applause of the audience.

The next man to take the Hot Seat was tall and broad-shouldered. He must have been about forty-five, and wore a grey suit and large spectacles. He looked intelligent and intimidating at the same time, savvy and self-assured. Magnusson announced his arrival, but was drowned out by Trellick talking over him.

‘Renton Twain,’ he growled. ‘Brilliant, barmy. Wasn’t always barmy, though. Wasn’t always brilliant for that matter. Good worker, that I can’t deny. Sharp as a knife and keen as a blade. Did some excellent stuff for DOGS. Invented those little fold-up chrome scooters. All routine stuff though, nothing untoward. But then he started to hang around with the research boys down in the lab. Started getting ideas above his station. Got it into his head that he could perform some form of time travel, some wormhole in logic torn open by a kind of metaphysical domino rally. All started by a giant turbine. He always was very good at those things! What made this one different was that it moved not air, but reality itself. Not much - just enough to jog it, and that, he claimed, would start an avalanche. Causality was the key, he said. Causality, causality, causality. All he ever talked about. Now I like to think I’m a decent manager, and I encourage my boys to develop their own ideas, but Twain kept asking me for money to build this fancy contraption of his and I just couldn’t do that. I tried to explain to him his demands were well above my R&D budget, let alone the kind of money I could invest in an idea as far-fetched as his. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Causality is the key to all time!” he’d say. “I’ve studied it in depth, I know what I’m doing!” In the end, he decided the only way to convince me how much he knew was to go on Mastermind and make Causality his specialist subject. Oh, Renton. Terrible handwriting.’

Trellick trailed off. On the screen, the studio lights faded to a spot over Magnusson and a spot over Renton Twain in the Hot Seat. All eyes were on Twain now. Magnusson’s. The studio audience’s. The five million people watching at home. And fifteen years later, four men and a dog in Bob’s kitchen.

‘Renton Twain,’ read Magnusson. ‘You have chosen as your specialist subject the popular BBC hospital drama Casualty.’

At first I thought something had gone wrong with the video playback – Twain’s face appeared to have lost all colour. But the camera was fine; it was Twain who was broken. The next sixty seconds saw the abject humiliation of a man before one tenth of the population of Great Britain. Never before and never again did a contestant on Mastermind score absolutely no points in their specialist round.

The footage ended with Twain storming off the set, while Magnusson was still reading the answers. Trellick snapped the laptop shut and gave a great sigh.

‘Needless to say, Twain was never the same after that,’ he sniffed. ‘I could show you other things – the articles in the newspaper the next day; the appearances on Auntie’s Bloomers and 100 Most Painful TV Moments Ever hosted by Jimmy Carr; the entries in the Guinness Book of Records and Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. I have no great like for the man, but even I shed a tear for him that day.’

I was startled by a growl at my feet. Looking down, I saw Boswell snarling at something I couldn’t see.

‘This Twain chap must be our man,’ I reasoned. ‘Boswell’s not happy with the video, see. He must have recognised him.’

Trellick threw his hands in the air. ‘Then what is to be done?’ he implored us. ‘Doctor, I’ve no idea what he was planning, or where he’s hiding, but where a man so unstable is concerned I can’t help but feel anxious. Doctor? Doctor?’

Doctor didn’t reply immediately. He had his feet on the table and was reading a newspaper which hid his face. It was the copy of The Sun which Bob had discarded when we arrived.

Eventually, without lowering the paper, he spoke. ‘Nor did I know the answers to your questions, beyond a few vague notions,’ he said. ‘Until, that is, I picked up this.’

He turned the paper round for us all to see. A full-page spread declared PSYCHO CHEF ON THE LOOSE. I couldn’t read the newsprint from where I was sitting. ‘What does it say?’ I asked.

‘It says that in the early hours of this morning, a series of ghastly murders were committed in the area of Maldon. Each victim was found in their bed with pizza topping grilled on to their face.’

I felt like I had to sit down, but finding that I was already sitting down, I had to make do with slumping a bit. ‘Just like the dwarfs!’ I groaned. ‘It’s the metal monster, he’s killed again, exactly as you predicted!’

‘Good gracious God have mercy!’ wailed Trellick. ‘Don’t tell me he’s got to the DOGS before we could save them!’

Doctor shook his head. ‘Not DOGS,’ he said. ‘According to this article, all the victims were high-ranking executives in various paper towel manufacturers. And that, my friends, is the key to all our problems!’

Nobody really knew what to say to that one. Doctor had to break the silence.

‘It is my conjecture,’ he continued, ‘that the monster my colleague and I saw in Hangnail does not have rockets for hands, as we have been proposing, but in fact a pair of super-powered hot-air hand dryers.’

Nobody really knew what to say to that one either.

‘Look,’ said Doctor exasperatedly. ‘Have you ever looked at the hand towel dispensers in a public toilet? I mean really looked. They’re always covered in slogans like “Paper Towels are the most hygienic method for drying hands. Hot-Air Hand Dryers blast germs in a forty-metre radius whenever somebody uses them”. Whereas the stickers on the Hot-Air Hand Dryers say “Hot-Air Hand Dryers are the most environmentally friendly method of drying hands. Paper Towels cut down half a rainforest whenever somebody uses them. And they’re unhygienic too, because you leave them lurking in the bin, covered in germs.” And then the next time you see a Paper Towel dispenser it says “Paper Towels are made from 100% recycled paper while Hot-Air Hand Dryers pollute the environment and buy from Nestle and stole Shergar and murdered your child etc etc” and so on and so forth. We are talking, gentlemen, about two embattled industries here, firecely competing, nay warring with each other for control of our restrooms. But which do you prefer? Do you ever really think about it? Of course not! They are locked in an unending struggle, forever doomed to stalemate.’

It was quite an impassioned and reasonable speech, but still nobody really knew what to say to that one.

Doctor sighed. ‘My point is, one side of the war would do anything to gain supremacy over the other. And if that meant picking off the grandees of the opposing side, to cause a leadership battle and chaos in the ranks – well, then so be it. I would surmise that our metal friend is, or was, an executive in the Hot-Air Hand Dryer industry, who with Twain’s help has built a super-powered prototype Hand Dryer Mech-Suit to give him the upper, ahem, hand.’

‘But why would Twain be involved in such a squabble?’ blurted Trellick. ‘What has it got to do with DOGS?’

‘Nothing at all,’ replied Doctor calmly. ‘Except, notably, that hand dryers are primarily turbines. And turbines are what Twain was good at. I suspect the downfall of the Paper Towel industry is not his aim, but merely a side-effect of a greater, more dastardly plan. I would postulate that he is helping the Hand-Dryer industry with his advanced scientific knowledge, probably building the mech-suit himself, in exchange for a portion of their resulting profits to fund his own, true schemes.’

Bob was loving this. He was making a round of Welsh rarebits and pretending not to listen.

‘You still haven’t expounded upon what you believe these schemes of Twain’s to be,’ I pointed out.

‘Au contraire,’ smiled Doctor. ‘I mentioned them to you almost as soon as we met – though you undoubtedly didn’t realise it at the time, and I dare say neither did I. Do you remember, when we first met earlier this evening in my borrowed saloon car, that we made a deal to assist with each other’s problems? I would help you rescue your dog, and you would help me foil a catastrophic anomaly in the space-time continuum known by later scholars as the Yawn of Time. Five hundred years later, that is. When they’d invented pens again.’

‘I do remember,’ I replied. ‘And I promise I’ll help with the Yawn of Time bit, only the dognapping situation has got kind of complicated and-‘

‘But you are already helping!’ interrupted Doctor. ‘What we are dealing with here is the Yawn of Time!’

Trellick leaned in, his massive bulk shifting Doctor and me apart like an ancient seismic force. ‘Doctor, what is this Yawn of Time? I’ve not heard you mentioning it before.’

‘Of course not,’ Doctor replied. ‘It only appeared in the space-time continuum last Thursday. Took me by complete surprise, believe you me. I’d just popped down to London in the thirty-eighth century to get hold of a rare copy of the final episode of Columbo which was released on DVD that day, only when I arrived they didn’t have it in stock. They didn’t even have it ordered in. In fact there wasn’t a shop at all. There wasn’t a shopping centre. There wasn’t a London. There was a marsh, with a few scattered tribes living in huts.’

Bob, Trellick and I all recoiled in horror. ‘What?!?’ I cried. ‘But how could this be? Surely by the thirty-eighth century mankind is living in silver cities in the sky, and travelling by jet-pack, and eating whole roast dinners in a single pill.’

‘I can assure you,’ continued Doctor, ‘the thirty-eighth century was just as you describe, right up until last Thursday. Confused, I wandered from village to village, offering Polos as collateral and consulting with the elders. I learnt of a legend passed down through nearly two millennia, a legend of a giant whirlwind which had swallowed time itself and sent civilisation reeling back to its very beginnings. According to the elders, the whirlwind was the result of a war between two factions.

‘Nobody could recall just who those factions were, or why they fought, yet the legend stated clearly that both sides were from the same kingdom. It was only a small war, but on one side there was a wizard who could control the sands of time. Such power is dangerous in days as desparate as those of a war, and the wizard grew too ambitious with his abilities. He attempted to create an enormous vortex which would propel his men faster through time, enabling them to outflank, outwit and outdo their enemies before the opposing side could so much as blink.

‘The wizard was powerful and wise, but even he could not achieve such a feat. As the vortex grew in power it wrested itself from his control, and accelerated not only his own army but the enemy as well; it sped up the trees, the birds, the animals, the fishes, the water, the clouds, the ships, the towns, the cities, the lands, the continents, the world, the universe! Within a heartbeat all of reality was hurtling at breakneck pace through the water-chute of time, with nary an inflatable armband to keep its head above water!

‘Alas, time cannot sustain such expeditious movement for long. There is a reason time moves at the pace it does; it is a finite resource. As time is spent, it must be replaced with other time, and time takes time to regenerate itself. It’s like human breathing – after you breathe out, you have to stop and take in more air to replace what you’ve just exhaled. With the wizard’s vortex in operation, time was being used up quicker than it could be replaced; it didn’t have a chance to breathe. And do you know what happens when you use up all the oxygen inside you?’

Bob looked up from the grill. ‘You yawn,’ he said, ‘I saw that on a programme once.’

‘Correct!’ yelped Doctor. ‘And that is exactly what time was forced to do! With nothing left to give, the fabric of existence yawned, took a great big breath and sucked in all the time it had just spewed out – and more besides! Much more! A terrible unstoppable unbeatable unbreakable and quite frankly unfeasible rip-tide in the seas of time, pulling civilisation back, back, back through the ages until, what felt like just two minutes after the wizard had created his vortex, the human race who had so recently been building fabulous cities and flying to the moon and enjoying a skinny latte and voting on the X-Factor, found itself dwelling in caves and clad only in loincloths and subsisting on badly-cooked mammoth!’

Once again, nobody really knew what to say to that one.

‘But most important of all,’ added Doctor, ‘it means they never released that special edition DVD of the final episode of Columbo. So I scoured the continuum for anomalies, located one originating in Essex around this time, and parked the TARDIS up to do some snooping around, and shopping.’

I was confused. ‘I’m confused,’ I said. ‘How do you link all this to our present situation, with the dognapping and the paper towels and the dread Renton Twain?’ I looked down at Boswell. Boswell shrugged.

‘Don’t you see?’ Doctor stood up and started gesturing frantically. ‘The legend spoke of a war between two factions from the same kingdom – it’s the fight between the paper towels and the hand dryers! And the wizard who created a whirlwind which could control time is Twain, the turbine expert formerly of the Department Of Greater Speed! Twain hired dwarfs to kidnap his old colleagues and keep them out of the way; Twain provided the hand-dryer industry with the technology to attack the paper towel manufacturers; and it is Twain who, with the money the hand-dryer executives give him and under the guise of assisting them, will unwittingly unleash the greatest disaster ever to befall the universe! Gentlemen, the future of civilisation is in our hands. We must act fast to foil this diabolical plot.’

I leapt up and punched the air, because that’s what the hero always does in action-adventures. ‘Damn straight!’ I cried in an American accent. ‘I’m with you! Foiling’s my middle name!’

Boswell also gave an approving yap, though this may have been because I trod on his foot.

Sejanus Trellick rocked back on his chair, causing it to creak agonisingly. He stroked his beard gravely. ‘The question is,’ he growled, ‘where is Twain hiding? And how much time do we have to ferret him out?’

Thankfully we didn’t have to wonder for very long, because at that precise moment Pam the tea lady/second-in-command burst in looking terribly flustered.

‘Bob!’ she cried. ‘I need an Eggs Benedict muffin in my office immediately! Oh, and just out of interest, turn on the radio and listen to the news. There’s something which, if you were the head of MI5 and not just the sandwich maker, you ought to hear.’

So we turned on. We tuned in. We listened. We learned.

Just outside the M25, in the wealthy Essex suburb of Smashing, the mansion home of controversial entrepreneur and leading hand-dryer manufacturer Jonathan ‘Opportunity’ Knox had been surrounded by the combined forces of ten thousand armed paper towel factory employees.

I'll Never Eat Pizza Again

-nearer!

This is it, I thought. I’m going to die.

In fact I genuinely hoped I would die for once, because throughout my detective career I’ve frequently found myself thinking I’m about to die, only to be proved wrong time and again. It’s getting to be very humiliating.

And what better way to be forcibly shuffled off this mortal coil than by a giant metal monster flying at speed towards your face as you stand trapped in the shutters of an ice-cream van’s serving hatch? Methinks very few.

Doctor seemed less keen on the idea. He continued to struggle against his bonds, even as the titanic humanoid thing continued its blistering horizontal ascent through the dog-filled auditorium inside the van, even as the heat from its hand-rockets started to singe our eyebrows, even as the infernal roar beat at our senses, even as it got close enough for us to see our own terrified reflections in the top of its polished chrome helm…

There was a growl, a clunk, a rattle, and a general movement backwards. The van shot away from us, and the ground rushed up from behind to replace it. We had tumbled to the ground. We were free! We were-

My ears were filled with that roaring again, and as I looked towards the van I saw the monster burst through the steel grille like a knife through the film lid of a ready meal. Smouldering debris in its wake, it hurtled passed us, took a wingmirror off the next van and then, after a barked order from the cloaked man clinging to its back, turned towards the main road. I could see the glow of its rockets fading into the distance, could hear them echoing around Hangnail, then all of a sudden the lights and the noise vanished. Our enemy had disappeared, two tonnes of metal become nothing but darkness on the edge of town.

‘Well that was exciting, eh?’ smiled Doctor.

‘Whhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrr,’ I concurred insensibly, and something licked my knee. I looked down. ‘Boswell!’ I yelled, and sat up to hug my errant hound. Then I yelled ‘Aaargh!’ when I realised it wasn’t Boswell at all, it was some random pug, and I cried ‘Gerroff, you mongrel!’ and kicked it away. It gave a yelp and staggered off indignantly.

‘I say, that wasn’t very nice,’ Doctor frowned. ‘I think that little chap broke free from the auditorium and ran out here to free us by operating the shutters’ external release mechanism with his bare jaws. You could at least show a little gratitude.’

‘Bah!’ I sneered, pulling myself to my feet and dusting off my knees. ‘He’s just trying to steal Boswell’s fire. He shan’t sway my affections so easily, I tell you.’

Doctor wasn’t listening. He had already scampered round the van and in through the rear doors, into the cathedral-like room of cages we had glimpsed before. ‘Do keep up, old boy!’ I heard his voice echo from within.

So I did keep up. It certainly doesn’t do to let one’s Assistant get too far ahead; not unless one believes one’s path may be booby-trapped.

‘Chop chop!’ shouted Doctor as I clambered up on to the chequerboard floor tiles. He was striding off again, past the clustered cages, under the looming chandeliers, through stone archways hundreds of feet high, into the murky depths. There were no booby traps. The room was as empty, as still and as lifeless as a fossilized tree.

I kept up.

And up.

It was a very big room indeed, with no walls visible. Just endless darkness in all directions, darkness and cages and pillars.

‘Boswell!’ I called. ‘Boswell, where are you?’ There was no reply.

Eventually, what seemed like miles later, the faint outline of a doorway became discernible in the distance, the light on the other side of it casting a flimsy halo around the frame. It was a small, rectangular door, notable only for being incongruously bland in these dramatic environs. As we got closer, it became apparent that the door was open just a jar.

‘Enough for a pug to squeeze through,’ noted Doctor. ‘Nothing more.’

I remedied that state of affairs by grabbing the distinctly average doorknob and pulling the plain plyboard door open to its full. It revealed a little kitchen area: stainless steel work surfaces, racks, cupboards and applicances; terracotta tiled floor; white ceiling and, possibly, white walls. It was hard to tell, as the walls were obscured from floor to ceiling by tray upon tray of Pedigree Chum. In one corner, thousands of empty cans lay festering in a huge stinking pile.

‘They should recycle those,’ Doctor held his nose and waved at the offending mountain. ‘They smell like burning flesh.’

I nodded in agreement, fanning the noxious airs from my vicinity. ‘And cheese toasties,’ I added. ‘And grilled tomatoes. And anchovies. And pineapple. And… and… oh sweet lord.’

Walking towards the heap of cans I had passed a large work unit, revealing to me now a patch of floor which the unit had hitherto blocked from sight. Sprawled across the floor there were two charred dwarves.

Or at least, they were partly charred. Their bodies were clothed in the same black outfits I’d seen them wearing back in Central Park, and these were untouched. It was the heads, more specifically the faces, which were the worse for wear.

My hand shot up to cover my mouth.

‘Well I’ll be,’ said Doctor nonchalantly. ‘Look at those chaps!’

He bent down and peered at their faces.

‘Did you see this?’ he asked.

I nodded, hand still clamped to my jaw.

‘The faces?’ he asked.

I nodded again.

‘The way they’ve been-‘

‘Yes I bloody-‘ I had to stop at this point and throw up on the floor.

The dwarves’ faces hadn’t just been burnt. They hadn’t even been burnt off. They had had various toppings placed on them and then cooked into the flesh.

Cheese. Tomato. Anchovies. Pineapple. They were both pizza-faced.

I spat the last chunk of vomit out from the gap between my front teeth. ‘Who- who could do that?’ I gasped, quaking.

‘Someone with a good aim and an extremely powerful flamethrower,’ Doctor answered. ‘Or, of course, rockets where their hands should be, like our metal friend. It looks to me like he knocked the poor sods to the ground, threw the toppings over them, then gave them a faceful of super-heated air.’

‘That’s vile!’ I slumped against a tall-standing meat freezer, sweating and shivering. There was no air in this little room, certainly none that was not tainted with barbecued dwarf.

Doctor seemed unperturbed. ‘You think that’s odd?’ he said. ‘What I want to know is why the monster was carrying pizza toppings around with him.’

‘But he got them from here, didn’t he?’ I reasoned. ‘It’s a kitchen.’

Doctor shook his head. ‘Take a look around you!’ he replied. ‘Yes, it is a kitchen, but do you see anything in here other than dog food? I’ll warrant this is only a storage and preparation room for feeding all those canine captives. If there’s anything in here edible to humans, it isn’t lying around in the open – certainly not within easy grasp of a man involved in a tussle. Which leads us to ask, where did the toppings come from? Which leads me to conclude that the monster had them with him when he arrived. Which leads us to ask, why did he do so? Which leads me to conclude that this gruesome exercise was a deliberate, premeditated effort by a very sick-minded and dangerous individual. A trademark, or calling card, if you will.

‘Which further leads me to suggest that he intends to kill in this manner again.’

I gulped.

‘I have one other conclusion to make,’ continued Doctor, dipping his little finger in one dwarf’s face and tasting the result. ‘And that is that while our adversary may be a cruel, twisted psychopath, he makes an excellent Hawaiian.’

And at that point I nearly passed out, until I was startled into wakefulness by a sudden fierce banging coming from within the freezer upon which I was steadying myself. It knocked three times, and was followed by the merest of plaintive cries.

‘Shtefan? Izsh dat yoo?’ it seemed to say in a metallic muffle.

‘No-one called Stefan here,’ I replied.

There came a faint yelp, and then the distinct sound of someone trying to remain silent.

Doctor stood up, walked over to the freezer, ushered me to one side and yanked at the door handle. At first it wouldn’t budge – some terrible force had bent it out of shape – but a quick jab with the purple-and-silver thingummy soon had it turning freely, and we opened the heavy door together.

A cold mist instantly enveloped us, and as it cleared we could make out, cowering between two hanging pigs’ carcasses, a little dark figure. Like the others he was dressed all in black, but this time his face was intact – a pale, doughy little face. Seeing us, he gave another yelp and tried to hide behind one of the pigs.

‘Pleezsh!’ he whimpered. ‘Djoo not kyll mee! Vwe did azsh yoo shaid! I am shorry if zshat vwazsh wwrong!’

‘Calm down, old chap,’ said Doctor. He stepped into the freezer and put a friendly hand on the dwarf’s shivering shoulder. The dwarf flinched. ‘We’re here to rescue you, not hurt you,’ Doctor reassured him. ‘We certainly don’t intend on roasting your face off like those other two.’

He gestured towards the dead dwarves, and the survivor, seeing them, burst into tears.

‘Steady on there,’ said Doctor. ‘This coat’s dry-clean only.’

‘Zshey vwere my bruzshers!’ wailed the dwarf, and blew his nose on the lapels of Doctor’s linen jacket. ‘Look vwhat zshey djid too zshem! I shaw zshem djoo it!’

‘Who did it, little man?’ I asked. ‘And how did you get this Alien Technology? And what do you want with my Boswell?’

My Assistant put a hand up to stop me, which was rather above his station but I decided to forgive him this once. ‘One question at a time,’ he said, then turned back to the dwarf. ‘Now old chap, if you let my colleague and I know what’s going on, then we might be able to help you. So start at the beginning and keep going until the end, beyond which it is seldom advisable to continue.’

The dwarf snuffled a bit and wiped a podgy nose on the back of a podgy hand. He cleared his throat and began:

‘Vwe vwere firsht approasched at a countchy fair in Vwitham-‘

‘Witham?’ I interjected. ‘What business have three Russian dwarves have at a county fair in Witham?’

‘Pleezsh, vwe are nod Ruzshian-‘

‘Yes, you’re mistaken,’ Doctor concurred. ‘His dialect is quite plainly late twentieth-century Dutch.’

‘Vwe are nod Dutsch eizsher!’ The dwarf stamped his foot. ‘Zshis accshent izsh… izsh…’

‘Yes…?’ I pressed.

‘It izsh Klingon,’ sighed the dwarf.

‘Klingon?’ I gaped, astounded. ‘But you can’t be a Klingon! Klingon have big ridged foreheads. And Klingon are tall, and dark, and strong-‘

‘And fictional,’ added Doctor.

‘That too,’ I nodded.

The dwarf sighed again and sat down on a large ham. ‘Vwe are nod biolozshically Klingon. Vwe are human, of courshe. And vwe are fwom Vwitham. It izsh jusht zshat our Djad waszh vewwy musch intcho hizsh Shtar Tchrek, and he hadj vwun of zshose booksh you can get which tcheach you how to shpeak Klingon. You know, shomebodjy vworked out zshe whole langvaje? And he zshought id would be intereszhting to szhee whad would happen if you bwing up a child to shpeak it azsh a firszht tongue.

‘He refuszhed to shpeak English to us unchtil vwe vwere eight.’

‘Fascinating!’ said Doctor.

‘Bit cruel, isn’t it?’ I asked.

The dwarf shrugged. ‘Vwhen your vwife hazsh triplet dvwarvsh, you know zshey’re going to ged bullied at szchool anyvway.’

I wasn’t really sure what to say to that. I settled for changing the subject, and asked what had led the three dwarves to their fateful meeting at the county fair.

‘Job openingsh are very limited fur Klingon dwarvsh,’ he began. ‘Sho vwe shet up shop as mershenarieszh for hire. Each year, to djrum up buzshinesszh, vwe take out a shtall at zshe countchy fair betvween zshe oshtrich cheeszhe farm and zshe dog dishplay tcheam.’

‘That all makes perfect sense,’ nodded Doctor.

‘But zshis year,’ the dwarf continued, ‘inshtead of zshe uszhual clientsh – beleaguered rancherszh, bulliedj teenagerszh, zshat short of szhing – vwe vwere approasched by a tall, cloaked djentleman whoshe fasche was hiddjen djeep vwizshin zshe shadowsh of hizsh hood. He ljooked friendjly enough.

‘He ashked ush if vwe knew anyshing aboutch dogzsh. Vwe told him no, he probably needjed zshe dog dishplay team on zshe nexsht shtall, but he shaid zshey vweren’t zshe dogszh he vwaszh looking for. He shaid he vwantjed ush to catch shum ozsher dogzsh and kjeep zshem imprizshoned for a while, and zshen he wouldj take zshem off our handzsh. And he ashked ush again if vwe knew vwaht kind of dogzsh he vwazsh talking aboud?

‘Now, I didjn’t like zshe shound of zshis. I didjn’t know what dogzsh he meantch, and I shertchainly didjn’t want to go kidnapping zshe poor animalszh! Anyvway, vwhere vwould vwe kjeep zshem all? But my bruzsher Shtefan, he iszh shuch a ruszhlessh buzshinesszhman, he shaid “Yesh, vwe’ll do zshat, vwe know exshactly zshe dogzsh to whom you vrefer. How much can yjou offer ush?”

And zshe man shaid he hadj no money, and zshat made me really suschpischiousch, but zshen he shaid he vwould give ush inshtead zshe mosht amazshing Alien Tchechnologchy to accomplish zshe tashk, and afterwardsh vwe could kjeep it for ourshelvesh! But Shtefan vwaszh shtill in a bartering moodj, and sho he shaysh “Can it look like zshe A-Team’szh van? Vwe’ve alvwayzsh wanted a van like zshe A-Team’szh van.”

And zshe man waszh qvuiet for shecond zshen shaid it could look like anysching vwe vwanted. Even zshe A-Team’szh van.’

Doctor nodded again. ‘Chameleonic circuitry,’ he said. ‘A Time Lord speciality. Yes, it’s all adding up.’

‘Adding up?’ I exclaimed. ‘Hardly! I’ve more questions than ever. Who is this cowled man? What is his terrible metal accomplice, and why does it burn pizza toppings on to its victims’ faces? What ‘dogs’ were they really after? And why? And where the blast is my Boswell?!?’

‘And you shall have answers, old boy, if you’ll only have a little patience.’ Doctor stood up and walked out of the freezer, then turned back and addressed the dwarf. ‘Do you have a name, little chap?’

The dwarf hesitated, then took a few cautious, shivering steps into the kitchen. ‘Yesh,’ he replied. ‘Michael.’

‘Very well, Michael,’ smiled Doctor. ‘Would you be so kind as to tell us where all the dogs are currently concealed? We’ve seen them in the auditorium – saw all the dreadful events that happened therein.’

Michael pointed a shaking index finger towards an unremarkable door across the room. ‘Zshe entranche iszh hidden behind zshat cupbjoard,’ he said.

‘Splendid. Now, I need you to return all the dogs to their owners. You'll find most of their contact details on the collar tags, or rudimentary posters around Chelmsford's Central Park. I know it may seem like a mammoth task, but you’ll be surprised how quickly this vehicle can move when you press the right buttons. When you’re done, come back here and await my signal. Do this for me, Michael, and we shall repay your brothers’ murders! And as for you’ – and at this point Doctor turned to me – ‘nip into the auditorium and grab your Boswell, then make ready to leave. We have an urgent appointment in old London town.’

‘London?!?’ I asked, astounded. I make a point of avoiding the place if I can possibly avoid it.

‘Yes, London,’ replied Doctor. ‘I don’t know about you, but I could really do with a sandwich.’

Some Actual Action-Adventure At Last

Big and bullish and brash it was!

Silver and sleek and swift!

The monster was in and out of our headlights in a flash, allowing us the merest of glimpses: just enough to tell it was overtaking us on the road to Hangnail.

‘Could’ve been a deer,’ I suggested hopefully.

‘Not a deer,’ Doctor gravely replied. ‘Unless the deer in these parts are ten feet tall, encased in glistening armour made from an unidentified metallic substance, and stride on two legs at around fifty-two miles-per-hour.’

‘I don’t know much about deer,’ I said. ‘So we can’t rule it out.’

Doctor sighed. ‘Whatever it was, I suspect we shall find out when we reach our destination. It seemed to be heading the same way.’

I shook my head. ‘It could be an entirely unrelated, coincidental monster. Or deer.’

‘I doubt it.’ There was a hint of finality in Doctor’s reply, so I shut up.

Five minutes later we found ourselves among the bright headlights of Hangnail. It was a quiet town at night, save for the ice-cream-vans-cum-bars of the tourist quarter with their infamous foam-cum-Mister-Whippy parties, and the ice-cream-vans-cum-brothels of the red light zone. But these districts were both far away, down by the shore of the Crouch, and as we clambered from Doctor’s borrowed saloon car the streets around us were dark and silent. The sound of our feet crunching on the gravel was like an avalanche in the stillness, and I was so proud of that metaphor that Doctor had to poke me in the ribs to wake me from my reverie.

‘I said,’ he said, ‘have you been here before?’

‘Only once, briefly,’ I explained. ‘And only down by the shore. I was tracking an Abraham Lincoln impersonator and he got shot and I passed out. Beyond that I’m a newbie around here.’

‘I see.’ Doctor scrunched off down the nearest street. Though it was dark, I could make out that we were in some kind of residential area. The ice cream vans on either side advertised no other wares.

Doctor disappeared from view, hidden in the darkness by his long grey coat. I found myself alone. Alone, in the darkness, with mayhaps a giant metal deer lurking in the vicinity!

‘Doctor!’ I hissed. ‘Where are you?’

‘Only here,’ he chirped. I nearly jumped with fright. He was behind me!

‘How did you do that?’ I asked.

‘Trade secret, old boy!’ he grinned, tapping his nose. ‘Now, what did you say this van we’re after looks like?’

‘Like the A-Team’s van. Black with a red stripe and spoiler.’

‘Like that one, you mean?’ Doctor pointed down the way he had walked just now. A couple of hundred yards away was a van even less perceptible in the dark than those around it. Further squinting revealed to me a single red stripe along its side.

‘That’s the one!’ I whispered, and we tip-toed as quietly as possible up to its bumper.

Not a sound came from within. I risked a peak in the front window. The driver and passenger seats were both empty and dark, and a partition stopped me from seeing into the rear compartment.

‘Nothing,’ I reported to Doctor. ‘Let’s try the back door.’

We crunched quietly around the van to the large rear doors. I tried the handle gently. It was locked.

‘Allow me,’ said the Doctor, and held up the flashing silver-and-purple stick he’d earlier used in the saloon car’s ignition. He placed it near the door’s keyhole. There was a short whining sound followed by a soft clunk from inside.

‘Try it now,’ he smiled.

I did. It opened.

I peered inside.

I said ‘Crikey’.

The inside of the van was enormous. Bigger, it appeared, than the outside. Bigger by a factor of about three hundred and seventeen. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a veritable cathedral in there.

A chequerboard of black and white tiles covered the floor, stretching out to the left and the right and far, far off into the distance. Ornate stone pillars stretched high up at irregular intervals towards the dark, vaulted ceiling, from which hung a hundred heavy brass chandeliers upon long, groaning chains. The clusters of candles within them glittered like dying galaxies, spitting an epileptic blaze at the cages.

Ah yes, the cages. Rows of cages. Columns of cages. Stacks of cages. Piles of cages. Cages on chains. Cages on shelves. Big cages. Small cages. Square cages. Cylindrical cages. Oblong cages. Dodecohedronal cages. Cages of all shapes and sizes, in every direction, with thick bars of iron and great steel padlocks, cages with whom there would be no arguing. They were deliberate, they were calculated, and that made it all the more unsettling that they were empty.

‘Crikey,’ I said again. ‘Must be a Ford Transit.’

Doctor was gobsmacked, which made a pleasant change. He gaped at the cavernous space before him, his face a mask of incomprehension.

‘This… this can’t be,’ he murmured. ‘This technology… it doesn’t exist any more! Not in the wild like this. It’s impossible. Completely impossible.’

‘Those Ford fellows are certainly a canny bunch,’ I remarked sagely.

‘It isn’t a Ford,’ Doctor replied, his eyes still fixed on the van’s interior. ‘It’s Time Lord technology, this.’ He turned and looked me sternly in the eye. ‘That’s what I am, a Time Lord. This is alien technology!’

‘Coo!’ I exclaimed.

‘True,’ replied Doctor. ‘But that isn’t so amazing in itself. There’s extra-terrestrial activity all over Earth if you know where and when to look. No, what’s amazing is that the Time Lords, apart from me, are extinct – along with all their technology. The only surviving example of trans-dimensional interior design like this is the TARDIS, and that’s sitting back in your flat.’

‘Then how come there’s one right here in Hangnail?’ I asked.

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ grinned Doctor. ‘But I shall enjoy finding out.’

‘Here here!’ I piped up, delighted that my action-adventure seemed to be going well. I put a foot into the van and prepared to charge in.

Doctor placed a staying hand upon my shoulder. ‘Wait!’ he urged. ‘Look.’

He pointed down to the sill of the door. Just inside it was a WELCOME mat.

‘This must be the main entrance,’ he continued. ‘We shouldn’t enter here, they’ll spot us for sure.’

‘But it’s deserted,’ I said. ‘And I want to find out what those cages are for. My guess is that was where they kept all the dogs they’ve been stealing, in which case where are they now? To what ghastly fate have the evil Russian dwarves ferried them? And with my Boswell among their number?!? Oh, poor Boswell! We have no time to lose!’

‘You’re babbling, old chap,’ snapped Doctor. ‘Not thinking straight. Now, you say this is an ice cream van, correct? Then there must be a side-entrance.’

And with that he snuck off round the side of the van again. Closing the door I followed him and realised what he was up to – he was already holding the silver-and-purple thingummy up to the lock on the grille of the van’s serving hatch.

As he set to work my mind wandered. ‘Maybe that’s how the A-Team always managed to build an armoured vehicle out of three pipecleaners and a tissue box in the space of thirty seconds,’ I mused. ‘Their van was a TARDIS. Or was that Blue Peter?’

The grille jangled open a jar.

‘Et voila,’ Doctor stood back and held an inviting hand out towards the gap, bowing deferentially as he did so. ‘Aprez vous.’

I stepped up to the hatch, prised the grille up a bit further and stuck my head in. I didn’t climb in any further.

‘Well go on then!’ said Doctor excitedly. ‘Up and over, old chap!’

‘Um. I don’t think that would be a terribly good idea,’ I replied.

Beyond the hatch was another huge room, a different one to the cathedral of cages we had seen before. This one was a titanic auditorium, circular in shape, with a continuous spiral of red leather seats starting at ground level and worming its way straight up around the walls, forming a dizzying vertical tunnel of wooden railings and brass fittings. Electric bulbs under crimson shades emitted a pinkish glow and gave the chamber an intestinal air.

The chairs all looked very comfy indeed, with little side-tables between them stocked with gin and tonic and ice and lemon and trays of salmon sandwiches cut into triangles. I felt such luxuries were probably going unappreciated by the chairs’ occupants, who were, to a one, dogs.

That’s right, dogs. They were everywhere. It was like being back in Central Park, surrounded by all those photocopied ‘MISSING’ posters – there were lurchers and labradors, daschunds and dalmatians, toys and terriers, bulldogs and beagles, every conceivable breed of dog was in that auditorium. All sitting perfectly calm and quiet, preoccupied with the salmon sandwiches and the handy wooden railings which were just the right height to wee up.

And as if all that wasn’t odd enough – and this is why I was loathe to proceed any further – this time the opening through which I was peering wasn’t level with the floor of the room. It was in the ceiling. Looking straight down. The entire auditorium, gravity and all, was ninety degrees off-kilter. To enter the hatch would have been to hurl myself to my death, sideways.

‘All a bit Escher, isn’t it?’ said Doctor, whose face had appeared next to mine. ‘I’m almost vertiginous. I bet if we dropped a ham sandwich from up here we could knock one of those chaps out stone cold.’

I squinted and managed to make out the chaps to whom Doctor referred. There, far below (or ahead), on the circular grey stone floor in the centre of the spiralling seats, the three thieving dwarves were dragging something through a small archway under the first row. They were heaving it now on to the last remaining empty chair, the one at ground level. As one they let the object go and it struggled to life, bolting immediately for the sandwiches next to its chair.

It was another dog.

But not just any other dog.

It was Boswell!

‘Bmvv-wmmv!’ I shouted, because Doctor had anticipated this and stuck his hand over my mouth.

‘Sssshhh!’ he hissed into my ear. ‘Mum’s the word, old chap. Let’s not do anything rash.’

Reluctantly I stayed quiet and stayed put. At least I could see Boswell was happy, feasting on fine salmon and gin with the collie on the next seat. Whatever cruelty the dwarves had in mind for him, ‘twas better that he spend his final moments in blissful, ignorant indulgence than mortal fear of-

Doctor slapped me. Twice.

‘I said,’ he said, ‘who do you think that is?’

He pointed down at the stone floor. The dwarves had disappeared; in their stead, standing in the archway was the silhouette of a tall, broad-shouldered man. He wasn’t a dwarf at all. He barely fit under the small opening. He appeared to be wearing some kind of cloak or cowl; beyond that I could make out nothing.

He cleared his throat, loudly and deliberately. It echoed around the room, broadcast to all extremities by some concealed PA system. The dogs ceased their happy, noisy munching and pricked up their ears at this newcomer.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome!’ The man spoke in italics. That was the only way to describe it. His voice was a measured, purposeful baritone that somehow managed to emphasise every single word that left his mouth. ‘You are undoubtedly wondering why I have gathered you here. And I shall tell you! First though I must apologise for the rude handling you may have received from my agents. It was an unpleasant necessity, which I would have avoided if at all possible. But I couldn’t. Enough said.

‘I do hope you are comfy now, however. The salmon upon which you gorge yourselves has been caught fresh from the River Crouch today; the gin, specially imported by helicopter from Asia where it is rolled on the thighs of virgins. The seats upon which you rest your delicate rumps are crafted from the hides of endangered buffalo. Do I not see to it that my guests are treated well? I should think this a great deal better than the sandwiches Her Majesty provides at your normal place of work, no?

‘Ha! I know this is better! For let it be known, I once worked for your department too! Yes, it is true! But I was cast out, banished, ‘let go’ as they put it, simply for doing my best for the office, for devising new methods which would have seen our goals met, nay exceeded, in a fraction of the normal time!

‘But that is not what your employers want. They do not want to be outshone by a mere scientist. They were threatened by my genius! They said I was too radical! Too drastic! Too unstable! And thus, at the Christmas party in 1997 when we went to that little Chinese restaurant on Gerrard Street with the pink and blue wallpaper, they saw to it that my fortune cookie contained nought but a P45!

‘At the Christmas party! I mean, come on!

‘But a man can achieve much in eight years, particularly when driven by the demons of his unjust past. So it is that today, I can finally reveal to you the glorious schemes which your government saw fit to brush beneath the carpet! There will be some among you, in fact probably most, if not all of you, who will think me mad; who would, given the chance, see to it that I am driven into hiding once again. I fully understand. And that is why I have kidnapped and imprisoned you. In case you hadn’t realised.

‘But before I reveal my master plan, I suspect some of you are wondering just who I am. Did you once work on the desk next to mine? Did you put less than two fifty into my birthday whip-round? Were you perhaps among those who stifled a snort when the fortune cookie revealed my P45? Pah! Let it be known – as soon all of history will recall – that my name is-’

He put a foot forward, a foot clad in a brown Oxford, and prepared to step into the pink light of the auditorium. But as he did so, brave Boswell let out a short bwuff!

The foot withdrew instantly. The figure shrunk back into the archway, his shadowed head twisting wildly as he took his first proper look around at the auditorium’s occupants.

‘What?!?’ he cried. ‘What are these? What’s going on? These aren’t- Is this some kind of joke? Kraalff!’

The silhouette of one of the dwarves appeared by his side, just as all the dogs started to lose interest in their visitor. Some returned to the salmon sandwiches, some decided to bark instead. Some went with growling. Here and there one felt like having a good howl.

‘What in the blazes have you done, Kraalff?’ ranted the figure to his diminuitive companion. ‘These are… these are animals!’

I couldn’t hear the dwarf’s reply above all the noise. He wasn’t kitted out with a radio mic. But I could see that he was trembling.

‘Yes Kraalff, dogs! I asked for dogs! Not dogs, dogs! D-O-G-S! How could you possibly have thought I meant… pooches?!?’

There was another hiatus, filled with animal sounds. The dwarf clutched at his dark head and stamped his feet frantically.

‘Enough!’ roared the figure. ‘You have made a mockery of my genius and endangered the very success of my unbeatable plan!’ The figure turned to face the room beyond the arch. ‘Knox!’ he yelled into it. ‘Kill these pint-sized poltroons!’

The dwarf fell to his knees, clawing at the figure’s robes and presumably screaming something like ‘No! No!’ or ‘Please master, have mercy!’, before being yanked back into the next room and out of sight by some vicious, unseen force.

Doctor looked at me, concerned. ‘Do you think we should help him?’

I shook my head vigorously.

There came the sound of tortured, lingering screams from deep within the van, dying off at length into agonising death-gurgles.

‘Good call,’ said Doctor.

As the gurgles dwindled to nothing and became absorbed in the bestial cacophony of the auditorium, the tall man emerged at last from the archway. But a brown cowl covered his body and head, so I still couldn’t see him properly as he paced nervously around the floor.

Suddenly he was joined by another figure, a huge thing which had to duck and wriggle to get itself through the archway and still took a few chunks of masonry with it. My heart stopped. It was the monster we had seen in the road!

Big and bullish and brash it was!

Silver and sleek and swift!

And though my viewing angle was still restricted, I could now see that where there should have been its hands, there were instead two enormous chrome funnels!

‘Okay,’ I admitted. ‘It might not be a deer.’

The humanoid thing stomped across the floor to the cowled figure, leaving gaping cracks in its wake.

‘All Done,’ it said. Don’t ask me how, but it spoke in titles. ‘Toasted Two. Last One Hid In A Freezer. Locked Him In.’ It was an affected gravelly grunt, like the voiceover for a trailer.

‘Excellent work!’ cackled the other, in a fiesta of formatting. ‘Now come, let us fly home. It will be quicker than using this old heap. The dwarves’ failure has cost us precious time – we must intiative Phase Two immediately, before the dogs can sniff us out! The van will be quite safe left here – use the escape hatch.’

Saying that he jumped on to the metal monster’s back and took hold of its huge shoulders, as a child clings on to its father. The monster crouched down and aimed its hand-funnels at the floor. Suddenly the air was filled with a roar like a jet engine, the whole van shook upon its wheels, and before I knew what was happening the two huddled ne’er-do-wells were shooting up through the auditorium, past the seats, past the dogs, past the salmon sandwiches, and straight towards the dumbstruck faces of Doctor and me.

‘What do you think he meant by ‘escape hatch’?’ I asked.

‘I think we’ve got our heads in it,’ replied Doctor.

We tried to step away, but couldn’t. The grille of the hatch had slipped down while we watched the proceedings below, and had clamped itself down on our necks like medieval stocks. We were trapped!

With a monster flying towards us!

Getting nearer!

And nearer!

And-

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NEXT TIME

...'Get them!'...

...crash!...

...'Doctor! Look out!'...

...boom!...

...'This isn’t just about Earth. The whole of space-time is in peril!'...

...zoom!...

...'You! But you’re… dead!'...

...ratatatatata!...

...'And now… you shall burn!'...

ooooooowEEEEEyooooooo

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