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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sophie Aldred has been working as a professional actress, singer and director in theatre, TV, film and audio for the last 35 years. She is best known as the Seventh Doctor’s companion, Ace, who beat up a Dalek with a baseball bat. She has presented a huge variety of programmes on TV and radio, and provides many voices for animations including Tree Fu Tom, Bananas in Pyjamas, Peter Rabbit and Dennis the Menace. Sophie lives in Hertfordshire with her husband and two sons.

Dedication

To the three men in my life who ARE my life; you anchor me and yet allow me to fly. Vince, Adam and William – this one’s for you.

PRELUDE

As far as Justine was concerned, it was almost as if she had been scooped up from her old life and deposited on some remote alien world – just like the girl in that corny old film The Wizard of Oz. Except that it was no magical Technicolor kingdom in which she now found herself, it was central London in January, and that was about as far from magical as you could possibly get.

It had been raining constantly for nearly three days now. The coat that she was wearing purported to be weather-proof, but she doubted that the manufacturers had ever expected it to be worn continuously for day after day as she had been doing, and with no chance of it drying out. Her boots were starting to suffer as well, and she didn’t want to imagine how uncomfortable she was going to be if she had to start trudging through the streets with wet feet. Thankfully she had managed to wedge herself into the doorway of a closed and shuttered newsagent during the worst of today’s downpours, so at least the spare clothes that she had bundled up in her rucksack would still be dry.

There were much better places to shelter from the rain, of course, but recent experience had taught her that the bigger and more sheltered the storefront, the more aggressively the security staff would move her on.

She sighed. When she’d imagined her escape to the capital it had seemed so vibrant and exotic, the images on her television showing her nothing but happy, smiling people hurrying through the dazzling displays of twinkling lights as they went about their Christmas shopping. Those lights were all gone now, and if there ever had been any happy smiling people thronging the streets then they had all been replaced by morose impostors. She had lost count of the number of times she had been shouted at or shoved out of the way in the last few days.

Still … it was better than being back at home. She’d take the sullen strangers over Adrian any day.