2

The Strand was filled with crowds of hawkers, and feral children who trekked daily from London’s rookeries to follow moneyed gents the way iron filings follow a magnet, and red-cheeked revellers spilling on to the street outside the infamous Dog and Duck pub. If anyone had noted the elderly curmudgeon striding along towards Charing Cross, they would have noticed nothing strange about this gent, apart from the fact that he was staring at his own left hand with some surprise, as though it had spoken to him.

A retired army man they may have guessed, nodding at his overcoat and his measured gait.

A world traveller perhaps people might have surmised due to his Russian hat.

Or an eccentric scientist – this inferred from the bolts of white hair crackling in his wake, not to mention the ivory handle of a magnifying glass poking from his pocket.

No one would have known that there was a Time Lord in their midst that evening. Nobody except his granddaughter, Susan, who was possibly the only person in the universe who could make the Doctor smile at the mere thought of her.

There were numerous things that did not make the Doctor smile: chit-chat, answering questions in times of emergency, answering questions in times of complete calm, the paintings of Gallifreyan Subjunctivists (confidence tricksters the lot of them), the Earth spread known as Marmite, the human TV show Blake’s 7, which was patently ludicrous, and the clammy, pungent squeeze of a Victorian London crowd. Londoners endured a signature aroma composed of two parts raw sewage, one part coal smoke and one part unwashed-body odour. The great stink knew no master and was sniffed from queen to washerwoman. This stink could be exacerbated by summer heat or prevailing winds and the Doctor thought that there was not a smell that he despised more in the entire universe.

By the time he reached Charing Cross, the Doctor could stand the stench no longer and so hailed a hansom. He refused the cabbie’s offer of half a sandwich, pressed an air-filter mask concealed behind a kerchief to his face, and hunched down low on his bench to discourage the cabbie from asking any further questions. The Doctor ignored the journey, including the detour round Piccadilly where a milk truck had overturned, spilling its load across the avenue, and he gave his mind to the problem that had cost him many nights’ sleep and, more recently, his left hand.

The Soul Pirates were abominable creatures: a rag-tag rabble of the universe’s humanoid species with only two things in common. One, as mentioned, they were approximately human in appearance; and, two, they cared not a jot for the lives of others. The Soul Pirates had a very specific modus operandi: they chose a planet where the inhabitants did not yet have hyperspace capabilities, then hovered in the clouds above and sent down a jockey, riding an anti-gravity tractor beam loaded with a soporific agent into the rooms of sleeping children. The anti-grav beam was clever, but the soporific agent in the beam was genius, because, even if the victims did wake up, the sedative would allow their brains to concoct some fantastic fairy tale and so they would willingly allow themselves to be spirited away. They believed themselves able to fly, or saw the beam jockey as a glamorous adventurer who desperately needed their help. In any event, there was no struggle or hoo-hah, and, most importantly, the merchandise was not damaged. When the kidnapped children were drawn into the pirates’ ship, they were either sent to the engine room and hooked to brain-drain helmets, or chopped up for organ and body parts, which the pirates would transplant on to or into themselves. Nothing was wasted, not a toenail, not an electron, hence the bandits’ moniker: the Soul Pirates.

The Doctor had relentlessly hunted the pirates across time and space. It had become his mission, his obsession. According to his galactic network, the crew who had taken his hand were the only ones still operating on Earth. He had last tangled with them in this exact city and now the TARDIS had detected their anti-grav signature here again. For the pirates it would be twenty years since their captain sliced off the Doctor’s left hand, but for the Time Lord, having jumped years ahead in the TARDIS, it was a very fresh wound indeed.

This was what Susan would call a break. Soul-Pirate ships often eluded authorities for centuries because they had impenetrable shields, making it difficult to track them down.

They must have lost one of their protective plates, surmised the Doctor. And that had made the pirates visible for a few minutes, before they effected repairs. Plenty of time for the TARDIS to find them. Well done, old girl.

Unfortunately, whatever hole had allowed the pirate ship’s signature to leak had now been plugged and the Doctor couldn’t know if the pirates were still hovering above Hyde Park, hidden in the cloud banks, or off to their next port of call. A typical pirate crew had over a hundred streets that they revisited in random order. But the pirates had a tendency to revisit good harvesting sites. So if someone really wished to track them down, all they needed was determination and lots of time.

And I have both, thought the Doctor. Plus a resourceful granddaughter.

Sometimes too resourceful. Perhaps it would be wise to check in on Susan, after all. Sometimes it seemed as though she wilfully ignored specific instructions because, as she put it, it seemed the right thing to do.

And, while it often was the right thing to do morally, it was rarely correct from a tactical standpoint.

Just as the Doctor thought to call Susan, she must have thought to contact him as his wrist communicator vibrated to signal the arrival of a message. Surprisingly it buzzed a second time, then a third. Several more urgent buzzes followed.

The Doctor checked the small screen to see a dozen messages all from Susan coming through at the same time. How could that be? He had designed and built these communicators himself. They could broadcast through time if need be.

Then it hit him.

Stupid. Stupid. How could he not have foreseen this?

Aldridge was off-radar in this city. He would obviously have set up a series of jamming dishes. Anyone scanning the planet would find no trace of the surgeon or his gadgetry.

Susan had been trying to get through all evening, but he had been inside the jammed zone.

The Doctor scrolled to the last message, which had come through only seconds before, and clicked play.

‘Grandfather,’ said Susan’s voice, breathy and he could hear her feet pounding as she ran. ‘I can’t wait any more. The beam has hit number fourteen as you predicted. Repeat, number fourteen. I have to help those children, Grandfather. There is no one else. Please come quick. Hurry, Grandfather, hurry.’

The Doctor cursed himself for being a fool, threw some coins in the cabbie’s general direction and shouted at the man to make haste for the Kensington Gardens end of Hyde Park.

She was supposed to wait. I told her to wait. Why must she be so foolhardy?

As they neared the row of terraced townhouses at the end of the park, the Doctor played through the rest of Susan’s messages hoping for some information that might help him rescue her and the children.

From what he could gather, Susan had befriended three children in the park and managed to glean that their parents had gone to Switzerland to a revolutionary new spa because of the father’s nervous problems. Fearful of the curse, they had left one Captain Douglas, a soldier of the Queen’s own guard, in charge of the children to protect them.

The curse. The family, like many others, believed that children went missing because of a curse.

The Doctor could see the signature tawny orange light of the pirates’ beam entering the house. He jumped out of the hansom cab, then ran along a footpath lit by the firefly glow of gas lamps, and up the steps of number fourteen. The door was typically Victorian: solid and unbreakable by a shoulder charge.

How about my bio-hybrid hand? thought the Doctor, deciding to put Aldridge’s technology to the test.

With barely a pause he punched the door with his left hand, middle knuckle striking the brass-ringed keyhole, and in spite of the circumstances he felt a moment’s gratification when the metal lock crumpled beneath the blow and the surrounding wooden panel literally exploded into splinters. One of his fake glove fingers did split like an overcooked sausage but the Doctor knew that Aldridge would understand. Susan’s life was at stake after all.

He barged into the hall and straight up the stairs, looking neither right nor left. The pirates would come in on the top storey, directly into the bedroom. The Doctor knew which bedroom because of a glow emanating from under the door, and he heard a dull buzz like a far-off, agitated beehive.

The anti-gravity beam.

I am too late. Susan, my dear.

With a cry that was almost animal, the Doctor split the fake thumb smashing open the bedroom door, and what he saw in there nearly stopped both of his Time Lord hearts.

It was the type of bedroom one would expect in a normal upper-class Kensington townhouse: patterned velvet wallpaper, prints framed on the wall – and an orange beam retreating through the bay windows like a spooked snake. Perhaps in the world outside the Doctor’s, the orange beam was less than normal.

Susan was suspended in the air, floating out through the window, a dreamy smile on her lovely young face.

‘Grandfather,’ she called to him. Her movements were slow as though underwater. ‘I have found Mummy. I am going to see her now, do come with me. Take my hand, Grandfather.’

The Doctor almost took the proffered hand, but to do so would have meant entering the beam, just as Susan’s compassion for the children had caused her to do, and it was too early because the minute he took a breath in the beam the soporific agent would affect him too, and even Time Lords can only hold their breath for so long.

Beyond Susan, the Doctor saw a cluster of figures suspended by the beam.

The children and guard have been taken. I must save them all and somehow end this tonight.

And so the Doctor skirted the beam, ignoring Susan’s pleas, though they were breaking his heart, and climbed through a side window on to the roof where there was a Soul Pirate with a large sword waiting to catch a ride back to his ship on the tail end of the anti-grav beam. The pirate was huge and bare to the waist, his skin a patchwork of grafts and scarring. His too-large head was completely shaved apart from a braided lock, which stood erect on his crown like an exclamation mark.

Mano-a-mano, thought the Doctor grimly. And that pirate is a much bigger mano than I am.