Rose could tell he was really concerned, that this wasn’t just an excuse cooked up for her benefit. ‘Go and check the TARDIS, then.’

The Doctor nodded. ‘I’ll go and check the TARDIS, then.’ But he stopped at the doors, looking out of the nearest window on to a village green and church that were almost too typical of their kind. ‘Looks like May. Looks like England.’ He sniffed. ‘Not too far from the sea.

Hmm, get a whiff of that salt water. . . ’

Rose laughed and pointed to the TARDIS. ‘Go on, go and check it.’

The Doctor picked up his flagpole and bag of golf clubs and van-ished back inside the TARDIS.

Rose was about to follow him when she saw a newspaper lying on the bar. She couldn’t stop herself from grabbing it in her gloved hand and taking a look, checking the date. The Doctor was right: it was May.

Whenever she came back to Earth, Rose liked to catch up on the news. This was only a local paper, the front page concerned with nothing more exciting than a dispute over parking and a plan for a supermarket, but something made Rose take off her gloves and flick through its pages all the same as she walked idly towards the TARDIS.

3

A few pages in she stopped dead. She felt her heart miss a beat.

The headline ran ROMAN REMAINS AT CREDITON VALE. Beneath it was a colour picture of a middle-aged man in hard hat and yellow jacket, standing next to a large case that contained a broken section of Roman mosaic about six feet across. Depicted on the mosaic was a full-length portrait of a man and woman, both handsome, dark and curly-haired, in purple robes. Further along were a jug and a bunch of green grapes. And right at the far side, shown in shades of gold on tiny pieces of tile, was a familiar pepperpot shape. Three rods stuck out from it: an eye-stalk from the dome of its head, a sucker attachment and a gun from its middle. Its lower half was studded with shining circular shapes.

A Dalek.

Rose ran for the TARDIS – and the police box door slammed shut in her face. There was a loud thump. The light on top began to flash and the ancient engines deep within the craft ground into life.

‘Doctor!’ Rose called. ‘Doctor, what are you doing?’

Five seconds later, the TARDIS was gone. A deep square imprint on the pub’s flowery carpet was the only sign it had ever been there.

4

CHAPTER TWO

KATE YATES JUST knew it was going to be a bad day.

She was dreaming that she was back at school. Everybody else in the class was sixteen, while she was twenty-eight, and there were childish sneers and whispers of ‘Why’s she still here?’ Then she heard her dad shouting up the stairs, ‘It’s eight o’clock!’ At the same moment the radio on her bedside table came to life. A few seconds later she heard the front door slam as her parents left for their jobs.

Then the news finished and Wogan began talking, the gentle Irish chatter Kate had known since childhood seeping into her very bones.

He talked about toothpaste, last night’s TV. . . small, funny things. But for Kate he was simply saying, Just five minutes longer. Five minutes longer in your bed, Kate Yates, in the softest, most comfortable bed in the whole world.

He stopped talking and played some music. ‘This is Anne Murray,

“Snowbird”.’

Kate knew it was deadly, a song designed specifically to stop people getting out of bed and going to work. It was a drowsy, yawny song.

But she couldn’t resist, and she turned her face into a deep fold of pillow, closed her eyes and felt that, like the snowbird, she too should spread her tiny wings and flyaway.

A second later she heard another voice. A Scottish voice. Ken Bruce.

Wogan was handing over to Ken Bruce – which could only mean it wasn’t a second later but half past nine.

Kate sat up in bed and checked the clock. ‘What?’ she screamed.

‘How can it be? What happened to those ninety minutes?’

She threw back her duvet and ran for the bathroom, tore off her pyjamas, rolled a deodorant under her arms, grabbed a creased blouse from the airing cupboard, slipped into her work skirt and shoes, and hurtled downstairs. A letter lay on the mat for her: another credit 5

card statement that she could add to the tear-stained folder under her bed. She threw it over her shoulder, grabbed her bag, stuffed half a croissant her mum had left on the phone table into her mouth, and bolted through the front door, into what was often described as one of the most beautiful villages in the UK. But for Kate, Winchelham was only a beautiful trap.

Because she was twenty-eight and back. Back in the room she’d grown up in, waking each morning in the same single bed where, as a teenager, she’d dreamed of leaving. Creeping round the village for fear of bumping into someone from school and having to explain why she was here. The girl with the big-city dreams, returned from London under a cloud of debt, living with her mum and dad. Sorting her life out while working in a call centre by the nature reserve, at a corner desk facing away from the curlews and kingfishers, with a view on to some rubbish bins and the car park.

Thoughts of the call centre quickened Kate’s pace down the winding street towards the green. Her boss, Serena, would right now be looking at the empty corner desk, pulling her cardigan over her enor-mous, unforgiving breasts and tutting. Serena, who wouldn’t open filing cabinets in case she broke her nails. Serena, who disapproved of Kate’s personal calls, yet seemed to spend half her working day ringing her friend Sheila to discuss her wayward husband in a flat, dull tone. ‘I said, “If she’s out of your bed and out of your life, how come there are two tickets to the Gambia in your dresser drawer?”’

Calls came from people across the country, furious that their beds hadn’t been delivered as promised, or had turned up with no head-board or without wheels. Those calls would now be going to voice-mail.

Kate couldn’t believe she was actually running towards Serena, running towards the angry voices.

The village she knew in every detail – every lamp-post, every dodgy paving stone, every litter bin mocking her screwed-up life – blurred past her as she ran to the green and the 9.40 bus. It was now 9.39.

The buses were always late, but Kate just knew that this particular bus would be turning the corner by the church exactly on time, about 6

now. That would mean a long walk to work along a shady, muddy lane.

So she ran even faster.

Rose climbed out of her spacesuit. She could hear sounds of movement coming from upstairs. The last thing she wanted right now was to have to explain herself to the landlord, so she unlocked a window, hauled it open and squeezed herself through the gap on to the sunny, empty village street.

She knew the Doctor wouldn’t have abandoned her willingly. He’d be back soon with some bizarre and technical explanation. But then she thought of the Dalek on the mosaic. Surely there had to be some connection between it and the Doctor’s sudden disappearance. . .

She was distracted from these dark thoughts by the prettiness of what lay before her. The clouds were moving away now and the light blue May sky framed an idyllic scene: post-office, a little museum, village green and church. The Doctor had been right – beyond the church and over some low hills she caught a glimpse of the sea. A single-decker bus pulled round the corner of the green by the church and drove slowly along. It seemed impossible that the Doctor’s hectic, dangerous life could affect such a place, where things were carrying on much as they had for hundreds of years.

Rose sat on a bench and took the TARDIS key from the pocket of her jeans, waiting for it to glow and alert her to the Doctor’s return.