‘It isn’t,’ said the Doctor firmly. ‘This is something different.’

Ace glanced over at the Doctor, suddenly wary by the certainty in her voice.

‘You sound very confident about that.’ A surge of old anger started to build. ‘Please tell me that this isn’t some scheme of yours?’

‘It’s not!’

‘I’m not going to let you do this again, Professor!’ Ace suddenly let years of pent-up rage burst out of her. ‘If you think for one minute that you can just drop back into my life out of nowhere and start pulling the same old crud …’

‘Ace, I promise you, I have had nothing to do with any of this!’ said the Doctor pleadingly. ‘I know that we parted on bad terms, but I am sorry. For everything that happened …’

Ace kept her eyes on the road. She wanted to believe her. She really did. But she knew what the Doctor was like.

‘We’re not gonna have this conversation now, Professor,’ Ace said. ‘Anything else, fine. But not this conversation.’

Instead, the two of them talked about things that had happened since they had parted company; the places they had been, the people that they had met. The Doctor was impressed at just how big Ace’s charity empire had become, and at the projects that she had become involved with.

‘But it must have cost a fortune. How did you raise the finance?’

‘I’ve got you to thank for that, Professor,’ said Ace, grinning to herself.

‘Oh?’ The Doctor looked puzzled.

‘You remember that business in the 1940s? The Cybermen in the Blitz?’

The Doctor nodded.

‘Do you remember that one day you really wound me up?’

‘Um, no, not specifically,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘But then, I did tend to wind you up quite a bit, as I recall.’

‘Yeah, well, I decided that I’d had enough, so I set up a contingency plan.’

‘Oh?’

‘I grabbed 50 quid in old money from your wallet when you weren’t looking, found a bank that I knew would still be around in my time and opened a high-interest savings account.’

The Doctor just stared at her, saying nothing. Ace could tell that she was unhappy about that little revelation, but she didn’t care. She had known at the time that it was breaking one of the Doctor’s unwritten rules, but she had been so angry with him that that one act of rebellion had, in her mind, somehow helped redress the balance between them. He had been happy to manipulate her life for his own ends, so she’d felt it was only fair to manipulate his. Little had she known how useful that money was going to be all those years later …