'Did you meet your friend?'

The Doctor stopped his unpacking, looked up at Ben and was silent for a few moments. He walked over to the window Ben had been looking out of, stared at the view for a few seconds, then drew the curtains shut.

'Harold's dead,' the Doctor said softly. 'Murdered late yesterday evening.'

'Murdered? Doctor, I'm sorry.' Ben was unsure what to say.

'Were you close?'

The Doctor turned and looked him in the eye. 'Not really, I suppose. Old friends, but not close. It's so very sad though.'

Ben nodded. 'Yeah, of course. So who killed him?'

'The police don't know yet. They have some leads, but they still need to speak to a few witnesses.'

'So is that where you've been then? Helping the cops?'

The Doctor shook his head and began to pace up and down the room. 'I've been gathering my thoughts, so I haven't had time to go to the police yet.' He looked at his wrist, even though he wasn't wearing a watch. 'I think it's about time I did, though.

What are your plans?'

'Not sure,' said Ben. 'I spent today sightseeing with Polly.

She's gone for dinner with some bloke we met down by the Chinese Theater. I thought I'd just come back, put my feet up and bunk down here for a bit. I tell you, it's knackering work being a tourist.'

'Very wise, get some rest,' the Doctor said before turning to walk towards the door.

'You going now, Doctor? But you've only just got back!'

The Doctor nodded. 'I just wanted to bring you a bite to eat and to let you know that there was no need to report me as a missing person. I want to see the police now, as time is of the essence. The sooner this murder is solved the better.'

Ben tried to remember if he'd ever seen the Doctor sit still for five minutes.

'All right then,' he said, giving his friend a little wave. 'Have fun, and let's hope the police catch that murderer, eh?'

'They're the Los Angeles Police Department,' the Doctor said with a knowing smile.

Life is an unpredictable bastard, thought Detective William Fletcher as he stared at the corpse in front of him. One day multimillionaire movie producer Harold Reitman had been on the cover of the LA Herald-Express LA Herald-Express promoting his latest flick, the next he was lying face up on a table in the police morgue, nothing but a pale, comatose marshmallow. promoting his latest flick, the next he was lying face up on a table in the police morgue, nothing but a pale, comatose marshmallow.

'Now that's what I call a gut,' he smirked, prodding the body's stomach. The chilled white flesh rippled as he did so and a gush of not quite clotted blood spilled from the side of the man where the bullet had decided to make its exit.

The surgeon chuckled. 'Well, you must be the only thirty-five-year-old cop who doesn't have one. A couple more years and those doughnuts will catch up with you, I swear. Besides, you'd be a lard boy like him if you had the dough he had. You should see some of the stuff this guy ate. Some weird foreign rubbish, I'm tellin' you.'

'Anything else? Was he gowed-up?'

The surgeon shook his head. 'A day isn't really long enough for us to be sure, but preliminary tests aren't showing anything like that. Just food.'

'But nothing for the narco boys to get their greasy palms into? Well, that's something at least.'

Fletcher crouched down and stared at the exit wound. 'Can I see where the bullet went in?'

The surgeon lifted the body on to its side (which took a considerable effort from the little man) then pointed out the wound to Fletcher as if a huge hole along the corpse's spine, black with clotted blood, wasn't obvious enough.

Fletcher poked his finger into the wound and noticed the patches of burnt flesh surrounding it. 'Point-blank, huh?

Whoever knocked him off must have been able to get pretty close.'

'H'm... it's possible I suppose,' the surgeon conceded. 'I guess you never really know who your friends are.'

'Poor sucker,' Fletcher said, well aware that he was coming across as being apathetic about the whole case.

'Yeah well, that Reitman was a tough one. You know it wasn't the bullet that finally killed him?'

'What? His chest's half ripped apart, for Chrissakes!'

'I know, but he still managed to put up some kind of fight.

It seems our killer had to push him into the swimming pool to finish him off. This man drowned, Detective.'

There was a knock at the door, and Fletcher turned to see the scarlet-cheeked floozy known as Lindsey McEllen. 'Sorry to interrupt, Fletch,' the secretary said in a long Southern drawl, 'but they need you down in interrogation. They've found that guy you were looking for the booze hound seen hanging around the Reitman house. Well, actually, he found us. Just walked into the clubhouse, would you believe it. I guess he wants to confess or something. He seemed quite keen to talk to you.'

'The mood I'm in, darling, nobody wants to talk to me.'

Fletcher sighed and looked at his watch. 'I'll be down in a minute, right after we've finished sorting out Harry's COD.'

Fletcher marched into the sparsely decorated area of the station that had been set aside as an interview room, and slammed the door shut. Inside he found a short man wearing a tatty shirt and garish checked pants, sitting back in the interviewer's chair with his feet on the desk. He clearly just had an unusual dress sense rather than being a drunken street bum, though the rounded mop of dark hair on his head would seem to indicate that he hadn't been near a barber's in a while.

The man smiled as he noticed Fletcher. 'Aah! Detective!' he said in a pronounced English accent. 'So good of you to see me!'

He leapt up and held his hand out for Fletcher to shake.

'Actually,' Fletcher said with a heavy sigh, 'I thought it was you who was supposed to see me, not the other way round.'

'Well, Detective, I'm afraid I never was one for formalities.

So have we established a cause of death yet?'

Fletcher was astounded by the stranger's audacity. When several witnesses mentioned a suspicious-looking man hanging around Reitman's estate, he had assumed that even if they found the guy he would be overly defensive about the situation. He hadn't seen this much enthusiasm in a suspect since the Dalia questionings.

'Quiet,' he barked, gesturing for the man to sit back down.

He reached for an admin pad, ripped off a form, then handed it to the man along with an old pen he found in his breast pocket.

The stranger looked at the form as if he had never seen a piece of bureaucracy in his life, paused, then scribbled down his details in an almost illegible scrawl.

'There you go,' he said proudly, like a kid at a science fair.

Fletcher took the form, glanced over it then put it to one side.

'Right then, Doctor '

'Just call me Doctor, nothing else. The Doctor, if you like.'

Fletcher was too tired to argue.

'Whatever. Now let's cut to the chase. Harold Reitman was murdered by someone close to him, and the only people we've found who appear to have seen something suspicious all put the finger on you as that something.'

'Oh yes, I'm sure they would have done. It wasn't me though, of course.'

OK, at least Fletcher knew he wasn't dealing with a confession case, although this made the question of the Doctor's motives for turning himself in far more intriguing.

'So spill, Doctor. Where were you last night if you weren't at Harold Reitman's?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'You don't understand, Detective. I was was at Harold Reitman's. I was there for the whole thing.' at Harold Reitman's. I was there for the whole thing.'

Fletcher sat down in the chair that faced the Doctor across the interview table and reached inside his jacket for his cigarettes. He pulled one out, lit it, then continued the questions.

'So what were you doing there?'

'I've known Harold for some years now,' the Doctor said, an undercurrent of sadness permeating his voice. 'We met when he visited England back in the twenties. I haven't been to America in some time, and found myself here unexpectedly. I decided to take the opportunity to get in touch with Harold, to see how he was doing. My friends Ben and Polly wanted to see California, so I brought them along. I didn't think things would turn out so tragically.'

'So you show up on the same night that Mr Reitman gets himself killed. Quite a coincidence.'

The Doctor stared out of a window, apparently lost in thought. 'Yes, indeed it is. I still can't believe it.'

Fletcher didn't know what to make of this guy. He just didn't get the message that the detective was trying to pin the murder on him. Innocent or guilty, by now any normal human being would have been worried that they might end up accused of the crime. But not this Doctor. He just didn't care.

'So did you see what happened? Can you tell me who did did kill Reitman if it wasn't you?' kill Reitman if it wasn't you?'

The man looked down, and Fletcher noticed for the first time a vulnerability in his confident exterior.

'No, Detective, I'm afraid not. I had arranged to be there for dinner at half past eight, but as I arrived earlier than planned I decided to take a look around the grounds of his estate. I heard shouting coming from inside the house, but assumed it was just a domestic argument between Reitman and his servants. As the house guest, I didn't feel it was my place to intrude. Five minutes later I went round to the back of the house, to the swimming pool, and there he was. Poor Harold, face down in the water, dead.'

'So you heard voices, but you didn't see anyone?'

The Doctor shook his head. 'When I tried the house there was no one there. Or at least they weren't answering the door.

Someone must have alerted the police before I got there, as they arrived barely moments after I found the body.'

'And you just left, without waiting to talk to the cops?'

'I was busy,' the Doctor said with a hurt look on his face.

Fletcher decided to give him the benefit of the doubt about his tardiness to come forward.

'Do you think you could identify the voices you heard?'

'No, they were too muffled to make out. I think one was male, though that could have been Harold of course.'

Fletcher nodded. 'Of course.'

An uncomfortable silence followed, shattered by a vicious knocking at the door.

Fletcher sighed. 'Come in!'

It was Lindsey, again.

'Can I see you for a minute, Detective?' she drawled.

Fletcher got up and walked out of the interview room, closing the door behind him.

'Message from Captain Wallis. He's matched the roscoe from the Reitman place to a set of prints,' Lindsey told him, a smile plastered firmly across her face. 'I think the captain's having a bit of a hard time dealing with the news.'

'Why?' Fletcher asked. 'Who do they match to?'

Lindsey smiled. 'Only Robert Chate, would you believe.'

'Well well,' Fletcher said. 'Who'd have thought it, after all these years.'

He pointed to the interview room. 'Even if our guy in there isn't the killer, he might have seen something. Let me grill him for a few more minutes then tell the boys I'll be with them shortly.'

The secretary flashed him a toothy grin before marching down the corridor. Fletcher returned to the interview room, slamming the door behind him.

He sat down and stared at the Doctor, who was sitting patiently at the interview table.

He tried to read the strange man's face for signs of guilt, or signs of hiding something, or anything that would hint at information worth beating out of him, but the Doctor's face was expressionless in many ways innocent.

'Tell me, Doctor,' Fletcher asked, 'you heard of a greaser named Robert Chate?'

The Doctor didn't even twitch. 'I don't think I've ever met him,' he said. 'Is he a friend of yours?'

Fletcher chuckled. 'Robert Chate's a friend of everyone in the LAPD, Doctor.'

'Oh? Do tell?'

Something in the Doctor's eyes told the detective that giving out information would not do any harm, and might lead to the suspect revealing a little bit more about himself than he had done previously. Fletcher decided it was a risk worth taking.