1

The Strand, London, 1900

The Doctor was not happy with his new bio-hybrid hand.

‘Preposterous. It’s not even a proper hand,’ he complained to Aldridge. ‘There are only two fingers, which is rather fewer than the traditional humanoid quota.’

Aldridge was not one to put up with any guff, even from a Time Lord.

‘Give it back then. No one’s forcing you to take it.’

The Doctor scowled. He knew Aldridge’s bartering style, and at this point the Xing surgeon usually threw out a red herring to distract the customer.

‘Would you like to know why I closed my practice on Gallifrey?’ Aldridge asked.

Red herring delivered as expected. Every time he turned to Aldridge for help, this story was trotted out.

‘Was it our title perhaps?’ the Doctor enquired innocently.

‘Exactly,’ said Aldridge. ‘Call yourselves Time Lords? How pompous is that? Someone previously registered Temporal Emperors, had they? A pity, you could have shortened it to Temperors.’

Temperors, thought the Doctor. That’s almost amusing.

Amusing because a Time Lord known as the Interior Designer had once famously suggested that exact title at a conference and been nicknamed Bad Temperor for the rest of his quantum days.

But the Doctor could not allow even a glimmer of a nostalgic smile to show on his lips – firstly because smiles tended to look like a death rictus on his long face and secondly because Aldridge would exploit the moment to drive up his price.

‘Five fingers, Aldridge,’ he insisted. ‘I need an entire hand just to do up my shirt in the mornings. Humans put buttons in the most awkward places even when they are quite aware that Velcro exists.’ He checked his pocket watch. ‘Or rather, will exist in half a century or so.’

Aldridge pinged one of the curved ceramic digits with a scalpel. ‘The exoskeleton has two fingers, I will grant you that, Doctor, but the glove has five, including the thumb, all controlled by signals from the exoskeleton. A bloomin’ bio-hybrid miracle.’

The Doctor was impressed, but would not allow himself to show it. ‘I’d rather have a bio-bio miracle if it’s all the same to you. And I am in a dreadful hurry.’

‘Come back in five days,’ said Aldridge. ‘Your flesh and bone hand will be ready by then. All I need is a sample.’ He thrust a specimen jar under the Doctor’s nose. ‘Spit if you don’t mind.’

The Doctor obliged, feeling more than a little relieved that spittle was all Aldridge needed from him. Some time ago, after the whole Inscrutable Doppelgänger fiasco, he’d been forced to part with two litres of very rare TL-positive blood from which to work up plasma.

‘Five days? You couldn’t get the job done with a little more urgency, could you?’

Aldridge shrugged. ‘Sorry. I have a cluster of amphibi-men in the back, all hissing for their tail extensions. It’s setting me back a fortune to hire a fire truck to keep ’em lubricated.’

The Doctor stared Aldridge down until the portly Xing surgeon relented.

‘Very well. Two days. But it’s gonna cost you.’

Ah yes, thought the Doctor, preparing himself for bad news. ‘How much exactly is it going to cost me?’

Although how much was perhaps the wrong term to use as Aldridge usually dealt in commodities rather than currencies.

The surgeon scratched the bristles that dotted his chin like the quills of a porcupine. If ever one of Victorian London’s cads, scoundrels, dippers or muck snipes stepped inside Aldridge’s Clockwork Repair and Restoration hoping to light-foot it down the Strand with a couple of glittering fobs, they would have had a nasty surprise. For Aldridge could balloon his cheeks and expel one of those venom-laden bristles with a speed and accuracy comparable to that of the rainforest nomads of Borneo wielding their blowpipes. The villain would wake up six hours later, chained to the Newgate Prison railings with very fuzzy memories of the previous few days. Prison warders had taken to calling these occasional deliveries ‘Stork Babies’.

The Doctor pointed pointedly at Aldridge’s chin. ‘Are you trying to intimidate me, Aldridge? Is that a threat?’

Aldridge laughed and his beard rippled. ‘Oh, come on, Doctor. This right here is the fun of it. The barter and such. Our little game.’

The Doctor’s face was unreadable. ‘Even if I hadn’t lost one of my hands, I would not be smiling like an idiot. I don’t laugh. I don’t play games. I have a serious mission.’

‘You used to laugh,’ rebutted Aldridge. ‘Remember that thing with the homicidal earthworms? Hilarious, was it not?’

‘Those earthworms excreted nitrous oxide,’ said the Doctor, ‘known on Earth as laughing gas, so I was laughing against my will. I do not usually indulge in merriment. The universe is a serious place and I left my granddaughter watching a house.’

Aldridge spread his fingers on the desk. ‘Very well, and I only make this offer because of the wonderful Susan. What I require for the rental of the bio-hybrid and the growth of a new hand in my vat of magic is …’ He paused, for even Aldridge knew what he was about to ask would not be swallowed easily by a Time Lord who did not possess a sense of humour. ‘One week of your time.’

The Doctor didn’t understand for a moment.

‘One week of my time?’ Then the penny-farthing dropped. ‘You want me to be your assistant.’

‘Just for the week.’

‘Seven days? You want me as your assistant for seven whole days?’

‘You hand over your time and I hand over … a hand. I have a really important repeat client that needs a job done. Having a smart fellow like yourself at my elbow would help a lot.’

The Doctor pinched his brow with his remaining hand. ‘It’s not possible. My time is precious.’

‘You could always regenerate,’ suggested Aldridge innocently. ‘Maybe the next guy will have a better sense of humour, not to mention sense of fashion.’

The Doctor bristled, though not as dramatically as Aldridge did on occasion.

‘This outfit has been chosen by computer so that I may blend in with the locals. Fashion has nothing to do with it. In fact, fashion obsession is the sort of frivolous distraction that gets people –’

The Doctor did not complete his sentence and the surgeon chose not to complete it for him, though they both knew that killed was the missing word. The Doctor did not want to say it in case putting voice to the word would bring death itself, and there had been too much death in the Doctor’s life. Aldridge knew this and took pity.

‘Very well, Doctor. In return for four days of your time, I will grow a hand for you. I cannot and will not say fairer than that.’

The Doctor was grudgingly mollified. ‘Four days, you say? I have your word on that, as a fellow visitor to this planet?’

‘You have my word as a Xing surgeon. I can drop the hand at your TARDIS if you like. Where are you parked?’

‘Over in Hyde Park.’

‘You keeping your nose outta the smog? Actually I think I’ve got a few noses here if you fancy something less … pronounced.’

This was veering towards small talk and the Doctor had never cared too much for small talk or chit-chat. As for gossip and prattle, he loathed them both.

‘Four days,’ he repeated. The Doctor raised the stump of his left wrist upon which used to sit his left hand and without another word pressed the bio-hybrid claw-like fingers into the Xing surgeon’s chest.

Aldridge regarded the action in silence and raised his bushy eyebrows high until the Doctor was forced to ask, ‘Could you please attach the temporary bio-hybrid hand?’

Aldridge took a sonic scalpel from his belt.

‘Careful with that,’ said the Doctor. ‘No need to get carried away.’

Aldridge spun the scalpel like a baton. ‘Yessir. Careful is my middle name. Actually Clumsy is my middle name, but that doesn’t encourage clients and it makes me sound like one of those dwarfs that are going to be so popular when moving pictures get going.’

The Doctor did not respond, or move for that matter, as Aldridge was already working on his arm, attaching the temporary hybrid hand to his wrist and slicing away the burned nub of flesh and seeking out nerve endings.

Incredible, thought the Doctor. He seems to be barely paying attention and I can’t feel a thing.

Of course, that was the trademark of Xing-Monastery-trained surgeons – their incredible speed and accuracy. The Doctor had once heard a story about how acolytes were woken in the middle of a dark night by the pain of their own big toe being amputated by a professor. They were then timed on how long it took to reattach the toe using only the innards of a dental-floss packet, three lizard clips and a jar of glow-worms.

Hogwarts, it is not, thought the Doctor, realising that no one would appreciate this reference for almost a century.

Within minutes the surgeon was tugging on the thought-responsive plasti-skin glove and stepping back to admire his work.

‘Well, give ’er a wiggle.’

The Doctor did so and discovered, to his embarrassment, that the fingernails were painted.

‘Would this, by any chance, be a lady’s hand?’

‘Yep,’ confessed Aldridge. ‘But she was a big lady. Very manly like yourself. Hated laughing and such, so you two should get on very well.’

‘Two days,’ said the Doctor, pointing a finger tipped by a curved nail coated with ruby lacquer.

Aldridge tried so hard to hold back a fit of giggles that one of his bristles thunked into the wall. ‘Sorry, Mister Time Lord, sir. But it’s really difficult to take you seriously wearing nail polish.’

The Doctor curled his fake fingers into a fist, straightened his Astrakhan hat and resolved to acquire a pair of gloves as soon as possible.

Aldridge passed the Doctor his cane.

‘You never said how you lost the hand?’

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘I didn’t. If you must know, I was duelling a Soul Pirate who wounded me with a heated blade. If the blade hadn’t cauterised the wound, I think you’d be looking at a different Doctor right now. Of course, I managed to compartmentalise the pain through sheer concentration.’

‘Soul Pirates,’ sniffed Aldridge. ‘I won’t even serve those animals. They’re barred on principle.’

‘Hmmmph,’ said the Doctor, pulling his army greatcoat close to his throat. He might have said bah humbug, but that catchphrase already belonged to somebody else.