The mansion gave Scale pause. This was money. a grand lot of it. Was the stranger perhaps working for the mansion's owner? It was worth investigation. He determined to wait and explore the great house. If nothing else, perhaps some silver or jewellery would repay him for his trouble.

He watched the stranger come out of the house again, much more quietly than he had gone in but somehow, Scale could tell, still angry. He was just as glad to have shifted his focus to the fellow's possible employer. True, Scale had knocked him around, but it hadn't been as easy as it should have been considering the disparity in their size, and... there was something unsettling about him. Scale couldn't put his finger on it. It reminded him of the way he felt when, hurrying down a set of stairs, he'd miss one and for a moment tread on air. A sudden disorientation, a catch in his stomach, the beginning of fear.

Scale waited for at least an hour after the last light in the house flickered out before he carefully approached. During his vigil, he had watched the police patrols go by and gained a sense of their schedule: he had the area to himself for at least another quarter of an hour, and it didn't take him anything like that long to hurry around to the back wall and climb over it. In the silent privacy of the garden, he stood for a minute, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The odour of boxwood made him wrinkle his nose just like rich people to have in their fancy grounds something that smelled like cat piss.

After a few minutes, he could make out a pale path leading to the house. This proved to be of crushed stone, so he walked beside it on the soundless grass. Glass doors opened into the house, and to Scale's contemptuous delight one was ajar. Fools deserved to be robbed. If Scale had kept up with scientific theories, he would have thought of himself as fulfilling a necessary Darwinian function as he slipped inside.

The room was much darker than the garden, and again he stood still for a moment, blinking and listening. No sound at all. There was a piece of furniture beside him he put out his hand and felt papers. A desk. Not likely he'd find anything he wanted in a room with a desk. There might be a safe, but Scale had no skill with safes. Dimly, he made out a blacker rectangle against the room's blackness another door. He moved cautiously towards this. It too was open, and he stepped through on to a thick rug. Bit of luck, that. He edged to his right. What was this, then? A sideboard? And this on it? A metal tray and tea service silver, he had no doubt.

His heart almost stopped when the lamp flared up.

Standing in the door was the biggest man he'd ever seen. Some tiny, cool part of Scale's mind told him that this wasn't true, the fellow wasn't a giant, not like Hugo but the rest of him stood paralysed in open-mouthed fear. The man's hair was cropped short against his massive skull and he had the neck and shoulders of a bull. He wasn't moving, just watching Scale with black, brilliant eyes that glistened in the light of the lamp he held. Scale heard himself make a squeaky, gurgling sound. He jetted out his knife. The next instant, the weapon fell noiselessly to the rug as, calm and quick as a snake, the man simply reached out; closed a fist around Scale's hand, and squeezed.

Scale yelled and dropped to his knees.

'Be quiet,' said the than, 'or I'll break it.'

Scale shut up. He gasped shallowly. There were tears on his face. The man examined him indifferently.

'I let you come in here because I was curious, but you don't look very interesting.'

Scale didn't know whether his best bid for safety lay in agreeing or disagreeing with this opinion, so he did neither. He didn't really feel like talking anyway.

'Why did you choose this house?'

Scale was distracted by a figure who had appeared behind the man a young woman with a fierce, dark look about her. The man glanced down at her then back at Scale.

'Is he all right?' The woman nodded. The man smiled. 'This is Miss Kelly,' he told Scale. 'I'm going to release you now. If you try anything, she will cut your throat.'

Scale believed him. The woman frightened him almost as much as the man. He cradled his throbbing hand, looking up at them. He had broken into some hellish place. Were all his fingers crushed? He was afraid to check. 'Mercy...' he whimpered..

'I've had a trying day,' the man confided, 'and am not in a good mood. Answer me now: why did you choose this house?'

'I followed the other fellow, the fellow in the green coat.'

'And then decided to stay and rob a wealthy-looking residence. I see. Why were you following him?'

Scale was afraid to lie to the man, but he was even more afraid to tell him about the mirror. 'He owes me money,' he whined convincingly. 'See, I run an exhibit at the carny, and I invited him to place a little bet '

' and cheated him and he wouldn't pay you,' the man finished. 'You really aren't very interesting, are you? Stand up.'

Shakily Scale stood.

'Now go.'

Scale stared at him wonderingly. The man nodded towards the other room.

'The way you came in.'

Scale hesitated no longer. He dodged between the man and the woman, and in a moment they heard him scrambling frantically over the wall. The Angel-Maker frowned.

'Why did you let him go?'

'Because he was lying,' said Sabbath. He went and looked into the garden, making certain Scale had indeed fled.

'Lying?'

'If he'd wanted money from the Doctor, he'd have robbed him in the street on the way here. No, he had some other reason. No doubt it has to do with the Doctor's investigations; he tends to... annoy people.'

'But if he knows something, you could have made him tell you.'

'Why bother?' Sabbath turned back into the room with a shrug. 'He won't know anything of importance. And if, inadvertently, he may lead to people who do, well then the Doctor will be pulled into the thick of it, as he always is. And I can always find the Doctor.' Sabbath smiled. 'He told me how himself.'

Anji spent most of the time the Doctor was with Sabbath telling Fitz that the Doctor was going to have to Start Talking To Them. The rest of the time, she practised to herself confronting him when he returned and demanding explanations. But when he strode in, mouth grim and obviously angry, all that came out of her mouth was, 'Tea?'

'No,' he said and went upstairs to the TARDIS.

'Bravely done,' said Fitz from his armchair.

'I didn't notice you trying to get anything out of him.'

'That's because I'm not all uptight about this like you are. He'll tell us what's what in his own good time.'

'That's what I'm afraid of.'

'You trust him, don't you?'

'Of course I trust his intentions intentions,' she said, annoyed. 'But you know as well as I do he's always stumbling into something even he only knows half the story of, and when we don't know any of the story we aren't much help then, are we?'

Fitz threw his cigarette end into the fireplace. 'All right, then, you go ahead and try to get him to talk about something he doesn't want to. I'd like to see that, actually, but I'm off.'

'Where to?'

'Going with George to a lecture on Siberia.'

'What?' she goggled.

Fitz stood by the door, a little embarrassed, hat in hand. 'Well, yeah. Why not?'

'Why not? Because that kind of thing bores you stiff.' She put her hands on her hips and eyed him suspiciously. 'You haven't been taken over by some pod species, have you?'

'Oh it's a laugh a minute with Kapoor,' he snorted, clamping on his hat. 'Get a chap classified and you just can't take it when he jumps the groove.'

'I only '

'I turned thirty-three in Spain,' he said abruptly.

'You did?' she said after a beat.

'Yeah. In Guernica, actually. Bloody awful birthday.'

She wasn't sure what they were talking about. 'Fitz, I '

'I'm late,' he said, and went down the stairs.

Anji went up to the TARDIS.

'You're both acting weird,' she called from the middle of the empty console room. 'One of you had better come and talk to me, and it can't be Fitz because he's got a personality transplant and gone off to some bloody science lecture. Nineteenth-century science too! He'll have to unlearn it all!'

'Why? He's unlikely to apply it in any other century.' The Doctor had appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was in his shirt sleeves with a dishtowel stuffed in the waist of his trousers and was liberally dusted with flour.

'What are you doing?'

'I thought I'd make a cake.'

'What?' She followed him into the kitchen.

'A Lady Baltimore cake. American Southern confection. Rather complicated icing.'

There was more flour on the counters. Also eggshells and smears of butter and a large pale green ceramic bowl Anji had never seen before. She peeked in. It was full of sugar and chunks of butter.

'I mean "Why?",' she corrected.

'Why what?' The Doctor was looking around with an absent frown.

'Why are you making a cake?'

'Sometimes you just have to take the time to stop and smell the flour.' The Doctor paused, clearly pleased with what Anji thought was actually a pretty insipid pun. She maintained a neutral expression. The Doctor masked his disappointment. Casually, he turned, spotted a bottle of vanilla hiding behind the flour canister, and pounced on it triumphantly. Anji sighed and sat at the table. She watched him mess about with measuring spoons and a kitchen scale.

'Sabbath killed that magician?'

'Had it done.' The Doctor began to cream the butter and sugar with a fork.

'Why?'

'Because he's an ass!' The Doctor set down the bowl a bit too heavily and ran his fingers through his hair, leaving specks of butter in it. 'And he makes me behave like one too. I know better, but it still happens.'

'You're just angry,' she said. 'Why shouldn't you be angry?'

'I shouldn't give in to it. There's no profit there.' He returned to the mixing bowl. 'It won't get me what I want.'

'Which is what?'

'Mmm?' He stared into the bowl in concern. 'Would you mind looking for the raisins?'

'Raisins?'

'Yes. I'm sure we have some, but I couldn't find them earlier.' She tried to divert the conversation back to its earlier track. 'What do you want?'

'Raisins. I just said.'

'Doctor,' she began but now he was frowning worriedly at the cookbook.

'You have to use the soft-ball method to test the icing. I've never understood that.'

'Doctor...'

'I mean, is it supposed to form a ball as it hits the water? And how can you tell if it's soft or hard without taking it back out of the water? By which time, won't it have hardened anyway?'

She was about to say, 'You can work a time machine, surely you can figure out the soft-ball method of testing icing!', then she remembered that wasn't strictly true. Instead she asked, 'Don't you have a sugar thermometer?'

He brightened. 'Yes. I'm sure there's one around here somewhere.' He smiled at her. 'Would you mind looking for it?'

Briefly, she held her ground. 'We're not going to talk about any of this, are we?'

'No,' he said softly, 'we're not.' Then he smiled again, but not his charming dazzler a sympathetic smile, self-deprecating, even a shade rueful. 'But we're going to have a very fine cake.'

Chapter Twelve.

On a bench beneath one of the large, leafy trees a man sat shivering. He was big and healthy-looking and well-dressed, but his face was slack with some inexpressible inner pain. Anji knew this because, though she realised it was a foolish question to a patient at an insane asylum, she had asked him what was the matter. He had looked up at her frankly and said, 'It's only, you know, that there's no air in here.'

She went back and sat beside Fitz on a bench near a flower bed. He was smoking and watching the inmates unhappily. 'Makes you feel bloody useless, doesn't it?'

'Yes,' she said.

The man beneath the tree had begun, very quietly, to weep. Fitz looked away. Bloody place made him think about his mum. 'So,' he said, as if continuing a conversation, 'Sabbath's killing these people.'

'Apparently. Unless the Doctor persuaded him it was a bad idea.'

'He never struck me as the persuadable sort.'

'No.'

'The Doctor wouldn't say what they talked about?'

'No. He just made that cake.'

'Good cake,' said Fitz appreciatively.

'It's bothering him,' she said irritably, 'but he won't talk about it. Sometimes he is exactly exactly like a human man!' like a human man!'