Whereas Ryan had escaped by the narrowest of margins the hooded figure hadn’t been so lucky. The wheels of the tube train had virtually cut it in half and what was left was definitely not human … The lower half was wearing jeans, sure, but there was a long rope of a tail hanging out from the back of the waistband – and the top half looked far more like some kind of giant, misshapen rat.

Yaz and Ryan looked at each other. ‘I think we’d better call the Doctor,’ said Ryan quietly.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A little over an hour later, everyone was back at Ace’s laboratory at Kirkwood Farm. The tube-track accident meant that Perivale was now swarming with police and London Transport officials and so Ace had decided that the safest thing was for everyone to relocate until things calmed down a bit. The last thing they wanted at this stage was the police or some other organisation getting involved. With no obvious casualty, the authorities would hopefully come to the conclusion that it was just trespassers on the track – a common enough occurrence – and things would quickly return to normal.

There had been a casualty, of course, and that casualty was currently laid out on a laboratory bench being examined by the Doctor. Ace was busying herself analysing the slime that had been scraped from Kim Fortune, pointing out, when the Doctor had looked surprised, that chemistry was the one thing that she’d actually taken an interest in at school.

Kim himself was perched on a stool on the far side of the laboratory wearing a disposable paper boiler suit. His clothes had been saturated in the slime and Ace had had to bundle them into a hazardous waste container to stop them stinking out the workshop. She couldn’t imagine how unpleasant the drive from London must have been for the others – nor how Sanaul would react to the mess inside the Range Rover.

Kim was staring around the workshop like a kid who had just been let loose in Santa’s toy workshop. Letting him into her batcave was a gamble, but Ace had figured it was less of a gamble than leaving him on his own back in Perivale, especially if the authorities were crawling over everything. For the sake of security, however, she had insisted that he’d been blindfolded on the journey here. He’d resisted that, of course, complaining that he was perfectly trustworthy, but apparently when Graham had given him the alternative option of being locked into the Range Rover boot for the journey he’d quickly agreed to the blindfold.