‘Yes. Sorry. Sorry. Anyway, I came across a few references to some very strange deaths. People with their heads blown clean off. It looked like there was a pattern. So I thought I might, you know, slip back in time and do a bit of sleuthing.’

‘Certainly bore fruit with Spring-Heeled Jack!’ cried Madam.

‘Yeah!’ enthused the Doctor. ‘And the Glass Submersible! Remember that one?’

They giggled – and I must own to feeling a bit left out again. It’s never easy when old pals meet up and reminisce. It’s like going to a party where you’re someone’s new lady-love. There’s all sorts of how d’you do-ing and don’t you look nice and glasses of pop but, after a while, you’re left in the corner on your lonesome, nursing a tumbler of gin and a bad case of the dumps.

‘People get their heads blown off all the time,’ I interjected, a bit sourly. ‘How’d you know they weren’t just topping themselves with shotguns?’

The Doctor smiled. A sort of dangerous, mischievous smile and his dark little eyes shone like raisins in dough. ’It’s the precision of it, Jenny – I may call you Jenny, mayn’t I?’

I nodded.

‘The heads appeared to have been sort of sliced off. Very cleanly. But not by any known weapon.’

‘Alien?’ queried Madam.

‘No reason to think so. Not this time. At least, not yet. This fellow Blood was a reporter. And he reckoned there was a connection between the deaths and the Pomegranate Halls. I arranged to meet him but he didn’t show up.’

Madam took something from her sleeve and flattened it on the table. It was the piece of blood-stained paper she’d found on the corpse.

The Doctor peered down at it. ‘“Mortlock is not what he seems.” What exactly do you know about the All-Britannia Aptitude Contest?’

‘Not much,’ I grinned. ‘But I know a woman who does!’ I turned to the mop-haired, dumpy gal behind the tea-bar. ‘’Ere, Sal! A word in your shell-like!’

Sally Forth, you see – a mass of greasy red curls and squashed up face like a Hallowe’en turnip – was what you might call an enthusiast. She had all this information stuffed in her bonce: railways timetables, tides, lunar cycles, who was doing what to whom and where. Not all of it useful, mind you, but if you needed some info in a hurry, if you needed to get the boat train to Deauville on a whim or find out whether the rozzers thought saucy Jack was at his work again, Sal was your gal. A regular Bradshaw she was – with a generous side helping of the News of the World. So I asked her what she knew of the ‘All-Britannia Aptitude Contest’.