For a long time, nothing happened. Grint stared at him. Markham’s hand strayed casually towards his stun gun. And then, with a jerk of his head, Grint led Anders away and they vanished into the lengthening shadows.

Ellis sighed. ‘I’ll tell you what happened, Max, and you can see for yourself that no permanent harm has been done – not to Matthew, anyway – and then I can return my . . . team . . . to its proper home.’

Luke was sitting in the shadow of the pod and doing his best to render himself invisible. Peterson, sitting next to him, grinned. ‘Not so brave now, are you?’

‘I never expected to come face to face with his bloody mother,’ he muttered. ‘It’s a bit like Grendel and his mum, isn’t it?’

‘It’s exactly like Grendel and his mother,’ said Peterson, straight-faced. ‘Can I compliment you on your perspicacity and recommend you comment on this remarkable coincidence to Max as soon as possible. I am certain her subsequent actions will go a long way to resolving all your issues almost immediately. You may never have to worry about anything ever again.’

The sun was no longer overhead and long shadows were falling across the garden. The air was still warm and the sounds of a city in tumult were just a faint and far off murmur. Max leaned back against the pod wall and stretched her legs in front of her. ‘Go on then. Let’s hear it.’

Luke drew a breath. ‘I had a row with the fourth member of the team – Smith.’

‘What about?’

‘Not important right now.’

‘She said she was pregnant,’ said Matthew, still running his words together. An occasional but welcome after-effect of being sonicked by the Time Police was an overwhelming compulsion to tell the truth. ‘She said you’d told her to get pregnant so you could get out of the Time Police. You said . . .’

‘Yes, thank you, but not important right now, Matthew. Anyway. We had a row. In a public place. Jane overheard. I stormed off. She discovered Smith had been murdered. She thought I’d done it. She wouldn’t give me up. No matter what they said to her.’ His voice faltered for a moment. ‘And I thought she’d done it because she was caught trying to dispose of the evidence. So I planned to break her out.’

‘We planned to break her out,’ slurred Matthew with all the careful enunciation of the recently sonicked.

‘We planned to break her out. Which we did.’

With the cold condemnation of Judge Jeffreys himself, Ellis, seated on his plinth, said accusingly, ‘You set off a radiation alert.’

Luke shifted to face him. ‘Well, no, actually, no, we didn’t. The computer set off the alert. We just rigged the computer. There was no radiation.’

‘Sadly, you failed to advise any of the panic-stricken inhabitants of central London of that fact.’