Sky was waiting, as promised, outside Mile End tube station when Rani arrived in her fire engine red, ULEZ compatible, Fiat 500. She pulled up at the kerb just long enough for Sky to jump into the passenger side and fasten the seatbelt.

“It’s not far, but there’s a cul de sac and a one way road you might get down by mistake and anyway, I’ve got your parking permit. There’s a man three doors down who rings the police if anyone without a permit parks up for more than half an hour. And I don’t think he likes that number seventy-one is a HMO. ‘People coming and going all the time’ isn’t good for the community, he says. We don’t plan to stay, so we don’t care about the area. He thinks we’re into parties, fly tipping and graffiti or something.”

“According to my research, number seventy-one Clinton Road has been a HMO since before ‘HMO’ was even the word for it,” Rani answered. “It was bought as a nurses’ residence when The London Hospital was based in Whitechapel. That was in the early 1950s when the NHS was new and they needed to train lots of nurses. They must have come and gone all the time and the community has held together perfectly well. If anything, Mile End is more affluent and has less crime than it had back then.”

“You can tell him all that,” Sky remarked with a laugh. “I’m glad you’re coming to stay for a while. I miss everyone.”

“You’re not enjoying university life?” Rani asked her friend.

“Oh, yes,” Sky assured her. “But I DO miss everyone. Mum, you, Clyde, Luke when he’s at home. I miss having your dad as my head teacher, and your mum always gossiping and getting the wrong end of the stick every time.”

“I thought you picked a London University to be near home,” Rani pointed out. “I expected you to commute every day.”

“It takes nearly two hours on crowded tube trains morning and night,” Sky explained. “Besides, mum and Luke both assured me that a ‘real’ University experience, away from home, would be great. And it is. I love the classes I’m in, and I like lunch in Mile End Park and walking around the art centre there. You should show it to Clyde. He’d love it. And… I like the other students I’m sharing with. But I DO miss home, how it used to be.”

Rani understood. Sky was missing a life that was over for her, now. Bannerman Road, her childhood, was in the past. Even when she came back for semester breaks and holidays, it would be as a visitor, now, not as somebody who lived there.

Rani understood, but from the opposite side of the coin. She had stayed at home while she did her journalism apprenticeship and found her way as a fully-fledged newspaper writer, but it WAS different from putting on her school uniform and meeting Clyde at the gate, despite her dad’s disapproval. He had gone off to art college while she did a’levels in sixth form at the same school, under her dad. The old crowd had all gone their separate ways.

Now, she was often the only one hanging out in Sarah-Jane’s attic, with Mr Smith as the best research tool in the world, and inspiration from Sarah-Jane’s lifetime of stories about being a lady journalist when it still surprised Fleet Street that such a being existed outside of the glossy fashion and home furnishings inserts.

She was the only one who still regularly visited Sarah-Jane. That worried her a bit. Their friend, mentor, surrogate mum to them all, was getting old. There was no getting away from that. And Rani didn’t want her to ever think she was forgotten.

But it was ALL changing. It had to. Life WAS change. Sky going to university was part of it.

Forensic science! The choice of subject had surprised everyone apart from brother, Luke, who she had consulted by Skype, and Rani’s dad, who had assured her that one of the best places for that discipline was Queen Mary University, which had an excellent undergraduate course at their Mile End campus.

She was five weeks into her course, and very much enjoying it all. She assured all of her old friends that she had not, yet, examined any human bodies. That was much later.

She could, she had told all of the old gang, when they had gathered for a Zoom meeting from their respective homes, identify the most common toxic substances found in human blood. She also knew that the MOST common one that police needed to know about was alcohol.

Because they wanted to know, she also told her friends that the next six in the ‘top ten’ were recreational drugs people most probably inflicted on themselves, then prescription opioids and nicotine, before the poisons beloved of Agatha Christie and her ilk - arsenic, cyanide, strychnine, appeared in the list. The Zoom had ended with her older friends all having a new respect for her, and a determination to stay away from any of those substances.

Clinton Road was a rather nice double row of Victorian semi-detached and terraced houses. They were stoutly built, three floors, including clerestory attic windows, and in most cases, a basement. The windows and the fanlight in the front door were all curved at the top, giving an almost churchly appearance. When built, and even up until the fifties and sixties when the Mile End was a bit run down, generally, they would have been very nice family homes for upper working-class people. Now, those that were still three and four-bedroom houses were worth over a million pounds. Those split into flats, it being London, cost as much as a whole house in other parts of the UK. A shared room in the HMO at Number seventy-one Clinton Road was very much for students whose parents could contribute significantly to their higher education.

Sarah-Jane had done so. She had started trust funds for both Luke and Sky as soon as she had become their parent. Her daughter could live in a nice, respectable house only ten minutes’ walk from the campus. No slums and no ‘Halls of Residence’ which everyone dreaded, even if some of them looked very pleasant.

And for a little while, Rani was living there with her.

With her comfortable education budget, Sky actually had the self-contained basement, accessed by steps down from the vestigial front garden. Once the coal-storage and boiler room, it had been converted into a twin bedroom, small drawing room-cum-study, even smaller kitchenette and a bathroom that appeared to be the reverse of The Doctor’s TARDIS, being bigger on the OUTSIDE – a joke Sky had longed to share with somebody since she moved in.

“I don’t cook very much down here,” she explained as Rani dumped her bags on the second bed and followed Sky up a spiral staircase from the drawing room to the hall of the main house. “Mostly I pitch in with the others and we all eat together in the evening.”

Six other young people, two women, Sarita and Pamela, two men, Kyle and Ngabo, and two Rani wasn’t quite sure about, who wore androgynous clothes and hairstyles and were called Drew and Avery. Ngabo was from Rwanda, Sarita from India, and Kyle from Dublin. Pamela was in a wheelchair and had a ground floor room and adapted bathroom. Diversity was fully gratified by this group even without troubling them with the fact that Sky was an alien created by the Metalkind!

They all greeted Rani with welcoming words and invited her and Sky to sit at the table. Supper was groundnut chicken with jollof rice, courtesy of Ngabo’s mother’s African recipe collection, Kheer, an Indian pudding, and fried plantain chips for the starter – because Drew, despite being so bone-white he-or-she might have been Transylvanian, had spent his-or-her formative years on Guadeloupe - where his-or-her mother was a police inspector. References to Death in Paradise were strictly banned during mealtimes.

“One of these days, I’m going to do a bit of Irish cuisine,” Kyle promised. “But we all love the exotic stuff too much. Dublin Bay mussels and wild Shannon river salmon just don’t compare.”

Rani was quite happy. She loved Groundnut chicken, and her mum had fed her with Kheer, a sort of spicy, fruity, rice pudding, ever since she was eating solids.

“The only person who ever objected was Sasha,” Avery commented in a voice that seemed female in pitch despite what Rani was sure was the start of a Rhett Butler style moustache. “She had a macrobiotic-stroke-vegan diet. Her part of the fridge was a no-go area for the rest of us. Kyle threatened to get police tape across it.”

Sasha had been Sky’s flatmate at the start of term. Sky admitted that she was a perfectly pleasant woman apart from her dietary obsessions, which she lectured them all on just a bit too often, and usually when they were enjoying their favourite African chicken dishes.

“Funny the way she left, though,” Kyle said. “Just like that… throwing her bags in a taxi and not a word, since. The landlord said she hadn’t even asked for a refund on her term’s rent. Not that he’d have given her it, anyway. The tenancy agreement is clear on that.”

Rani had heard SOME of this from Sky but pretended ignorance to get the story from another viewpoint.

“She swore the house was haunted,” Sarita said. The others tried not to laugh, but Pamela had to hide a sudden cough in her handkerchief and Kyle was pressing his lips together hard to control himself.

“Haunted? Really?” Rani asked.

“She said she could hear somebody calling for help in the middle of the night. But nobody else heard a thing, not even Sky, in the same room.”

“That’s true,” Sky admitted. “But she woke me up three times and we walked all around the house – at three in the morning, like a pair of burglars. I heard nothing. I saw nothing.”

“I’m not even sure I believe in ghosts,” Rani added. “We spent the night at the Ancient Ram Inn at Wooton on the Edge a couple of years ago. Nothing happened, and that’s supposed to be the most haunted house in the UK.”

“We?” Pamela asked. “You mean, you and Sky?” Sky had told the gang that her friend, a journalism student, was interested in the spare bed for the rest of the term, but hadn’t mentioned the whole Bannerman Road equivalent of the Scooby gang.

“My brother and his boyfriend were doing a scientific study and the rest of us came out of curiosity,” Sky confirmed.

“Never again,” Rani added. “The toilet facilities were worse than Glasto.”

Everyone laughed and Rani’s credentials as a ghost hunter were forgotten.

After supper the group went to their respective rooms to work on projects or just get an early night. Sky had cleared all her essays in order to have time to talk to Rani alone.

“There ARE other causes apart from ghosts.” They both agreed on that. “Echoes of life… both from the past and the future….”

Sarah-Jane had long ago told them about her first adventure with The Doctor, when ‘ghosts’ had apparently been kidnapping scientists. The Doctor had insisted that the ion traces he found in the wake of a disappearance was from future technology, though witnesses had reported seeing translucent medieval knights.

The Doctor had been right. The technology was ahead of anything late twentieth century humans had. But the witnesses were right, too. The technology was wielded from the twelfth century by a stranded Sontaran who needed scientists to rebuild his spaceship. Obviously, The Doctor had thwarted the whole plan and rescued everyone.

“So… it could be something like that,” Rani suggested.

“I hope not. We’ve both seen Sontarans. I don’t want to tackle them – just the two of us. And I think mum’s had enough of them by now.”

“If it IS something like that,” Rani suggested. “We COULD get in touch with The Doctor. She’s the expert on that kind of thing. Or is she a he again, by now? Either way The Doctor is the one we all trust.”

“Yes, but ONLY if it’s Sontarans or Daleks… or worse,” Sky insisted. “I think humans should deal with human problems – even weird ones.”

“Yes,” Rani agreed. “And we’re the humans to do it.”

This they both agreed upon. They discussed three more ‘ghost’ appearances for which The Doctor and Sarah-Jane or other companions in later years, had found sinister alien explanations. They also considered current human thinking in the rather woolly area of parapsychology but weren’t sure they believed in any of the theories.

“Tomorrow, I’ll have a closer look at the history of the street,” Rani decided. “I’m fairly sure nobody was murdered around here, even though two members of the Kray Twins gang had some tenuous links to Clinton Road. But maybe there is something else.”

What parapsychologists did seem to agree on was that hauntings usually reflected traumatic deaths. But given that this was the East End of London, where traumatic death had often come from the sky in World War Two, there were very few reports of hauntings even from the most unreliable sources.

After talking a little more, Sky made Ovaltine in the kitchenette and they drank it and ate some leftover plantain sitting up in the twin beds. When they were ready, they turned out the lamp. The basement windows were high up the wall, and only a little street lighting filtered in.

Just enough light for Rani to fit a Bluetooth earpiece and select an audiobook on her tablet. She had taken to listening to fiction that way as she got off to sleep. Quite often she forgot to set the timer to switch it off and she would wake in the morning to the last chapter – or if it was a short book, just silence - from the earpiece.

Sometimes she was sure she dreamt the book. She kept planning to listen to a textbook about physics or something else she knew nothing about just to see if she unconsciously learnt anything.

She had started the newest Thursday Murder Club novel, but it had been a long day and she was asleep long before the sixty minute sleep timer stopped the reading.

She woke at a little after three o’clock to a sound in the earpiece that didn’t come from penguin audiobooks.

She sat up in shock. A voice was calling for help through her Bluetooth earpiece.

It was a woman’s voice, probably young.

It sounded young.

It sounded desperate. Lost, scared….

And alone in a way Rani knew she herself had never been alone in her whole life.

She reached to wake Sky, who sat up quickly and turned on the lamp as Rani told her what she had heard.

What she was still hearing.

“Listen....” The earpiece was one of a pair, but Rani only used one because she always slept with one ear pressed into her pillow. She gave Sky the spare earpiece and she fitted it on.

“Do you hear?” Rani asked.

“Somebody calling for help,” Sky said. “A woman. She’s lost and scared and….”

“And alone,” Rani added.

“Yes. She’s… moving away…. Now she’s coming back… louder… then away again…. Getting fainter. She’s going now….”

The voice was getting much fainter now, as if the mysterious woman was getting much further away.

And then she was gone. Too far to be heard, even in the dead of night with no other sound but two young women breathing as quietly as possible.

“A ghost?” Sky asked. “Is that what Sasha heard, do you suppose?”

“It would be a strange coincidence if there was another disembodied voice in the night,” Rani confirmed. “It must be the same.”

As she spoke, she ran the last part of the audiobook. The narrator was female, but her voice was very different to the one they had heard. A calm, settled voice of somebody safely ensconced in a recording studio with tea and biscuits on hand at the end of the chapter.

Modern downloaded audiobooks weren’t like cassette tapes or vinyl records, the sort of thing Sarah-Jane’s generation had been used to, or even the CDs that came later. There was no leading in, no white noise after the recording ended.

She checked, just in case there was a fault in the download. There was nothing amiss. The novel was followed by an interview with Richard Osman, and then it was finished. No empty space remained afterwards.

The earpieces had still been ‘powered on’. You had to press a button to turn them on and off. A strange, artificial but vaguely oriental voice said, ‘power of’, with a soft ‘f’ not a hard one as in ‘off’ and ‘power on’ and ‘deesconnected’ with that long ‘ee’ vowel if she left her phone and went too far away from its signal.

On, off or disconnected there was no noise. Modern Bluetooth earpieces didn’t even buzz slightly like older headsets.

“And it didn’t pick up anything from another phone,” Rani said. “It’s still paired with my phone. It says so in the settings menu. That voice…the woman calling for help, not the silly ‘deesconnected’ one was… from somewhere else.”

From a ghost world? From outer space? From another dimension? From hell… or heaven? Not unless they had been misled about either place. They discounted those last possibilities straight away.

But the other ideas would have to be considered.

“Did Sasha have a Bluetooth earpiece,” Rani asked. It seemed an obvious question. It explained why Sky hadn’t heard the voice when Sasha had claimed that she heard it.

“No, but she had a pair of sound cancelling earmuffs. She said it was for her neurodiversity.”

“What sort of neurodiversity?” Rani asked.

“I asked her that. She said hearing other people breathing at night drove her nuts.”

“But she chose a twin room?”

“I asked her about that, too,” Sky added. “She said hearing her own breathing at night drove her nuts.”

Rani considered that.

“I know ‘neurodivergent’ has become an umbrella word for people with real conditions like autism,” Rani said. “But if you want my opinion, I think Sasha was more neurotic than neurodivergent.”

“Or just plain nuts,” Sky suggested. “But you’re not. And you DID hear the voice, so she was right about that.”

“Yes, she was,” Rani agreed. “And you called me here because you thought there was something in it. So, we have to take it seriously.”

“I have tutorials all morning, but after lunch we can both explore the house.”

They agreed about that and then went back to bed. There was nothing to be done now. And neither needed to be overtired in the morning.

They walked together to Queen Mary’s University, using a short route by the towpath of the Regent’s Canal. Sarah-Jane had made Sky promise not to use that route on her own, and certainly not in the dark, but with Rani beside her it felt safe enough. They parted at the University campus, with Sky heading for tutorials in identifying chemical residues in the Joseph Priestly Building, named after the eighteenth century pioneer of chemistry. Rani, using a visitor’s pass, went into the campus library where she could get a better internet signal than the HMO in Clinton Road offered and other resources for her research.

They met at lunchtime at one of the area’s unusual landmarks, the Green Bridge, a grass and tree lined cycle and pedestrian bridge over the A11, traditionally known as the Mile End Road, because it was, centuries ago, a mile from the official centre of London at Aldwych. Beneath the bridge were several take away food outlets, and Rani bought a large pizza to share in the mild, but slightly autumnal, open air before they headed back to the ‘haunted’ student house.

“There is absolutely no record of any hauntings around Mile End,” Rani reported. “Nor are there any UFO sightings in the area. I have left a very strange search history on one of the library computers, with all the conspiracy sites. I do wish ghosts and aliens could be researched by people with mainstream credibility. I even used a code Sarah-Jane gave me that allowed access to some of the low risk UNIT files. Nothing around here has ever come to their notice.”

“So… what does that mean?” Sky asked. “Is there a ghost, or an alien, in our house?”

“There is something. But it’ll be you and me writing the reports for future UNIT files – but not the UFO or paranormal forums. Those people are too much.”

Sarah-Jane had impressed upon them both the necessity of keeping the strange things they had investigated over the years out of the Fortean Times, UFO.co.uk and the Daily Star. Rani liked working for serious newspapers and Sky had yet to make her mark in her chosen field, so they were happy to keep anything they might find strictly to the government restricted archives.

They began in the basement, looking closely at the walls, particularly the wall beside Rani’s bed, where the ‘call’ had been strongest.

“There is ONE thing I’ve wondered about,” Rani said. “This basement IS smaller than the footprint of the house. That much is obvious even from the floorplan on Zoopla where they advertise the rooms for rent. I think there is at least six feet more on this side that goes under the drawing room and the ground floor bedroom.”

She tapped the wall. It was solid brick from one end to the other. If a part was sliced off, it was done maybe as far back as the 1950s when the house became nurses’ accommodation and it was done with real bricks and mortar. It was no plasterboard partition or anything so simple.

“Do you think that has anything to do with the mystery?” Sky asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it just means several generations of students have been denied some wardrobe space.”

“If there is a gap, it might be somehow funnelling the cry from wherever it is,” Sky suggested. “A conduit from… wherever.”

“That’s a thought worth holding onto,” Rani said. “I’ve ordered copies of blueprints from the 1870s when the street was built and the 1950s conversion, but they will take a couple of days to come through.”

“So… what do we do in the meantime?” Sky asked.

“Everyone else is out. Let’s look about upstairs. I’d like to measure the drawing room, to see if it IS bigger than this room.”

They did that first. The drawing room was open to all of the tenants, not like the bedrooms that could be safely locked.

“I was right,” Rani said after twenty minutes of shunting furniture and ten with a tape measure. “This room is nearly eight feet wider than the basement room.”

“You’re ghost hunting, aren’t you?” Sky and Rani turned to see Avery lining up Pamela’s wheelchair so that she could get into the drawing room without bumping into the door frame. “I thought you might be after supper last night and all that talk about Sasha.”

There was no point in denying it. The two of them sat on a sofa and Avery took an armchair next to where Pamela wheeled herself.

“Everyone else thinks it IS a joke,” Avery said. “Sasha running off makes it seem like one. But we’re not quite sure.”

“We weren’t expecting anyone home,” Sky pointed out.

“I have a study period this afternoon and it is far easier for me to spend it at home than calling a wheelchair cab to get to the library. Avery is here as my study partner. But don’t worry about that. You’ve been tapping the wall downstairs? We could hear you.”

“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” Rani responded apologetically.

“That’s not important, either,” Pamela said. “The thing is, I had the basement two years ago. I had a car accident and had to quit my course while I had a truckload of operations. I came back this term and got the ground level flat with the wet room, just because those sort of rooms are hard to find, not because I was ‘drawn’ to the house in any spooky way. I did wonder if I should explain the ‘soft bit’ to you and Sasha. Then Sasha got scared and ran off and I REALLY didn’t know how to explain things to you.”

“Soft bit?” Rani and Sky asked at once.

“You’ve been tapping with your knuckles,” Avery said. “That doesn’t do anything. You have to run the flat of your hand along at about shoulder height until you find it.”

“You know about it?” Sky asked Avery.

“Pam told me after Sasha ran off. I went down when you were out and felt where she said.”

“I found it not long before my accident,” Pamela explained. “A section of wall that my hand went right through as if it were wet cement. And…. I’m almost sure something touched my hand. I yanked it back, reflex action, and didn’t dare try again. I put a Greenday poster over the place. I was trying to find out who I could trust without looking like a crackpot… but it was only a few days later, one silly moment crossing Mile End Road while not paying attention and I was in a coma. When I woke, I was missing some memories, including the basement mystery. It took a while to separate dreams from real memory. But… since the business with Sasha….”

“There IS something,” Rani said, and related her overnight experience. “Somebody needs help.”

“Then we have to help,” Pamela insisted. “Let’s get back downstairs.”

She looked at Avery, who nodded and lifted her from the wheelchair with the kind of gentle care that made Sky and Rani both think that they were more than just STUDY partners.

The four came back to the basement. Pamela sat on the end of Sky’s bed while Avery and Rani together looked for the ‘soft bit’. Of course, the Greenday poster was long gone, and the annual painting of the wall hadn’t triggered anything strange, but they both found it this time.

“Like wet cement,” Rani confirmed. She pushed her hand through, then her whole arm. Sky watched in astonishment.

“There’s somebody here,” Rani said. “On the other side. Ohhhhh….”

She pulled back from the wall, and as her arm and then her hand came back through, she was holding another hand – a pale, slender, but very much living hand of a woman. She tried to pull it through, but the other woman seemed to recoil, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

“I lost her,” Rani cried. “I could have brought her through, but I lost her. She couldn’t hold on.”

“Who is it?” Sky asked.

“I don’t know. But we HAVE to get her out of there. We have to.”

The four young people looked at each other. Rani was right. They had to rescue the woman from wherever she was. But nobody knew how.

“She called out to me,” Rani said. “She grabbed my hand. I should….” She paused and swallowed hard. “I should go in and get her.”

“No!” Sky exclaimed. “No…. We don’t know anything about what’s behind there. It’s obviously more than a bit of strange DIY work. It’s too dangerous. You could be trapped, too.”

“She’s right,” Pamela said. “You can’t….”

“Stay here, everyone,” Avery said, and dashed for the stairs.

“Like, where am I going to go?” Pamela asked. Sky and Rani laughed gently. The three sat on the bed until Avery returned with a bag full of potholing gear, including harness, helmet and lots of rope.

“I haven’t done it since Pam and me got together. It didn’t seem fair to leave her behind.”

“As if that matters.” Pamela responded. “We can have different interests and still be an item. But…. Oh… you think…. You want to…”

“I think it should still be Rani. I’m the experienced one. I should supervise. And I can do the pulling… on the way back.”

“It makes sense,” Sky said. “But, Rani, if you get lost… I’m not going to be the one to tell your mum.”

“I won’t get lost,” Rani promised as she let Avery tighten all the buckles and clips on the harness and attach a long rope to it.

“Ready?”

Rani wasn’t ready, but she couldn’t say so. She stepped towards the wall. She felt for the ‘soft place’ and found it. Avery and Sky took up the rope as she stepped through the wall.

Nobody spoke for nearly a minute. Then there was a tug on the rope. Sky and Avery pulled together, at a firm but even pace. They could feel a weight on the other end. Rani was there. Maybe somebody else, too.

They fell through the wall with a squelching noise and slid to the floor together like a pair of wet cement covered fish. Rani was gasping for breath. So was the young woman she had brought back with her.

“She needs an ambulance,” Rani said when she could speak. “She’s almost starving to death and dehydrated, too.”

The doctors at the Royal London Hospital, a very short way down the road, confirmed that diagnosis, but they wanted to keep the young woman in the psychiatric ward.

“She says her name is Rose Keel, and that she was born in 1932. She came from an orphanage in Dublin to work in London – where she says her boyfriend walled her up alive in 1954 – because she wanted to leave him.”

She also said it was only about a week ago that it happened. She had eaten nothing, but there was a leaking water pipe that she drank from, which saved her life. Healthy humans can last weeks without food, but die in a very short time without water.

So said the medic from UNIT who turned up and superseded the NHS doctors.

Even UNIT couldn’t explain how it had been more than seventy years for everyone else, but only a week – though a traumatic one – for her.

“The Doctor can explain that to us next time she – or he – is around,” Sarah-Jane said on the subject and they left it at that.

Interestingly, the ‘soft place’ had solidified now that Rose Keel had been rescued, and no UNIT scientist could work out why it had done so.

But that wasn’t the end of the matter.

Because Rose wasn’t the first woman that her boyfriend had hidden away. Rani confirmed that in the very short time she was in the gap between the walls, she had seen a skeleton as well as a scared, miserable woman - Rose - running up and down, looking for a way out.

Those blueprints Rani had hoped to get in a few days were expedited by Kate Stewart and after examining them both she arranged for the tenants of seventy-one Clinton Road to stay in a nice hotel while her troops carefully demolished the inner wall of the basement and found a skeleton, still dressed in rags of her dress, with a ration card from 1951 in her pocket.

The card identified her as Nancy O’Toole, from a small town in Ireland, who had come to be a nurse in the brand new National Health Service. Her family had reported her missing when she didn’t reply to letters, but one girl in London proved easy to lose. The police investigation came up with nothing.

Nobody suspected Brian Woods who owned the house in Clinton Road. Nobody suspected him two years later when Rose, another Irish nursing student, this one with nobody to ask about her, disappeared.

Woods had died in 1967, nearly a decade after he had done a lot of building work and then sold the house to the NHS for – ironically, given the terrible secret it held - a nurses’ residence.

Two vicious crimes had been committed, but since Woods was dead there was no new police investigation. UNIT took care of the other details. Kate saw that poor Nancy O’Toole’s body was sent back to Ireland to lie in the family plot beside her now dead parents.

She also arranged for Rose Keel to have new identification papers for her to live in London in the second decade of the twenty-first century. She even got her onto an undergraduate science course at Queen Mary University and a place to stay in the twin-bed basement alongside Sky. With the outside wall plastered and painted, the enlarged room was perfect for two young students, and both felt there was nothing to worry about now the secret was uncovered.

When Rose moved in, and Rani moved out, there was a special supper. Kyle did Dublin Bay mussels in a garlic and ginger sauce for starters while Caribbean, African and Indian cuisine accounted for three more courses. Rose was not used to such bounty. She was only just getting used to no rationing and a king on the throne. But she enjoyed the meal in her own way and joined in the merriment.

“So, you were never really a student?” Drew asked Rani.

“Well, I WAS a couple of years ago. Now I’m a qualified journalist. But I’m not going to publish anything about Clinton Road. I’ve written a full report for UNIT and it’ll go in their secure files. My first one for them. It may not be the last. The world is a strange and exciting place. Though hopefully life here will just be quiet and boring from now on.”

Everyone toasted that hope in wine, cider and orange juice, according to their preferences.

“It’s a pity you’re not staying, though,” Avery said. “There’s a single room going. Pamela and I are going to stop pretending and be an official couple. I’ll be sharing the ground floor flat with her.”

Rani had still not worked out whether Avery was male or female, or somewhere between the two, but maybe it didn’t matter. A couple was a couple.

“No,” she said. “Sky doesn’t need me around. She’s got her own future to work for.”

“I have to, now,” Sky observed. “I’ve had my first human body to investigate. Forensic science is definitely going to be my thing.”