AT ROUGHLY THAT SAME moment the Doctor was thinking tea would be lovely and also realising he was feeling a bit hungry, Mrs Agnes Findlater was pottering beside the Arbroath seafront, a few miles north west from the Fetch Brothers Golf Spa Hotel. She was heading along the West Links and away from the slowly declining old Miniature Railway station. A light summer breeze gently tousled the wave tops out to sea, and the afternoon light was sparking off the water in a way that did her heart good. These days, she was feeling her age a wee bitty and it was especially cheering to be outdoors and enjoying a nice day and a breath or two of salty air.

She was just remembering how much fun she used to have on what was then the fairly new tiny railway. While she’d been raising her children, she’d been able to take them to visit it in its huffing and steaming prime with queues and crowds gathering to climb aboard for trips up the little line. Tasty snacks had been on offer along with the sort of fun which seemed to have faded away at around about the same time gentlemen stopped wearing spats. Although she couldn’t honestly say she’d ever seen that many gentlemen wearing spats during her life, there was something about them which suggested fun.

Agnes thought that today she would go as far as the point where Elliot Water ran into the North Sea and then head home for a pancake and jam, maybe even two. She did seem to be feeling extremely peckish.

And this was when a number of unusual things happened.

Firstly, when Agnes – or Mrs Findlater, as she preferred to be known – glanced over at Mr Gillespie, who was walking his dog in the distance, she felt absolutely sure that he too was thinking about the model railway and long-ago summers.

Secondly, she was just as absolutely sure – while his dog leaped and barked about his ankles in some kind of alarm – that Mr Gillespie was also thinking about her thinking about the railway and about pancakes. There was this kind of terrible echo inside her head. It was making her feel seasick. She also had a terrible taste of pennies in her mouth.

Thirdly, the echo was getting worse and now seemed to additionally involve what were surely the very disorganised and slovenly thoughts of the two young men in overly tight jeans with ridiculous flares who were kicking about over there in the surf and – now that she looked more closely – falling over and shouting while holding their heads. Young people today simply didn’t know how to behave.

Fourthly, Agnes observed – and she was an observant woman, as any of her neighbours would have stated with enthusiasm, had anyone asked – that the shoreline closest to where she was standing was…well, she didn’t like to use this kind of word, but it was writhing. And while it was writhing it was also thrusting upwards and outwards with these really quite disgusting-looking growths, like living branches, or thick whips, or other things she didn’t wish to consider. They were moving very quickly – and even hungrily – towards her.

Fifthly, Mrs Agnes Findlater of Heather View, North Port, Arbroath, disappeared entirely in a swirl of sandy light, muscular goo and violent motion. And a brief glimmer from the metal clasp of an imitation crocodile skin handbag.

‘It was as if the ground just swallowed her up,’ Bobby Christie would say to a reporter for the Dundee Courier and Advertiser that evening. Bobby was one of the young men who had been harmlessly hanging about on the beach near Agnes and had seen some of the incident in the small spasms of clarity during which he wasn’t experiencing the worst headache of his life and getting seawater in his eyes because of rolling about in the surf, helpless with pain. He regretted at once not adding ‘man…’ at the end of his statement and regretted this even more when his friend, Callum Smith, remembered to say both ‘man…’ and ‘you know what I mean, yeah…?’ Smith would therefore have made himself appear almost impossibly suave and sophisticated around the town for several weeks if his statement had ever appeared in the paper. Of course, it didn’t and this meant that no one ever got to appreciate his attempts to sound like a soon-to-be bass player in a soon-to-be popular band with a soon-to-be catalogue of amazing progressive rock hits.

The sixth unusual thing involved the Northern Zone Regional War Room. This was a vast and beautifully air-conditioned, radiation- and blast-proof bunker, its entrance carefully camouflaged as an innocent-looking cottage near Creif. Inside the bunker, a number of members of the Civil Defence Corps experienced what they mainly described as a weird feeling. Their delicately calibrated instruments, ever-watchful for signs of nuclear attack and other dire perils, didn’t pick up any trace of unusual activity, but nevertheless – they all felt weird. For several long and queasy minutes, being tucked away beneath three metres of tungsten-reinforced concrete, steel beams and nifty brickwork didn’t feel like any kind of protection at all.

Seventhly, Mr Gillespie left his dog with his sister in Carnoustie at round 7 p.m. and then went quietly home, ate an entire loaf’s worth of toasted cheese and then went to bed for a week. Mr Gillespie was generally agreed to be a sensible man.