Life after regeneration

Chapter 5

Alec was not looking forward to the media gathering.  He'd told Miller to go home and meet him back at the station afterwards, he'd have to put off his meeting with Rose Tyler for now though she may not be too pleased about it.  He got back before his DS, who came in with two parcels of food and put one on his desk.  He pulled a face.

"It was all there was, the Chinese was closed so eat or starve."

He opened the parcel, he somehow hated eating out of paper.  He looked at the time, nine fifteen, Rose Tyler would be giving up by now.

"What's wrong with you?  Got somewhere else to be?" Ellie asked him as he picked at the food and taking it as a sign he would rather be elsewhere.

"So, this is your first murder involving a child?  How are you finding it?" he asked, trying to find some excuse to go take his medication.

"It's horrific, a child is bad enough but when you knew him?  Aren't you afraid it will turn into another Sandbrook?"

"I wondered how long it would take you to bring that up Miller, I think Sandbrook makes me the best person to deal with it, don't you?"

Ellie thought about it.

Rose had been drinking coke in the bar and avoiding being stared at by a few of the locals, hoping that if Alec Hardy did actually turn up, there wouldn't be a pile of unconscious blokes littering the place.  By ten, she figured he'd changed his mind or maybe he really did know who she was, she was just getting over Pete's theory.

After some careful consideration, Pete had told her the reason he thought no-one, including them from Torchwood knew of Alec Hardy's existence and his involvement in the last case he'd been on.  Torchwood employees had training not to be fooled by such things as psychic paper or what Rose had taught them about perception filters, that even when something or someone was in front of you, you diverted your attention away from it and it made something virtually invisible.

"So, you think this Alec Hardy has had a perception filter around him until he arrived here?" Rose had asked Pete before she'd gone to dinner and to wait for the detective's arrival.

"Well it explains why we never heard of him before now.  Rose, you know as well as I do that if anyone resembling the Doctor made a public appearance, we would have known about it, someone from here would have brought it to our attention, well except for that Scottish actor you seem to like so much but we'd know if it was him, he was here long before you arrived and you said there was one in your old world.  I talked to Mickey and Jake about it, they think the same as I do, that Alec Hardy appeared to the world like he's always been here, only we can see that he didn't and that only means one thing."

Rose knew what that was.  The sudden appearance meant that somehow, the Doctor had made it through and had lost his memories, very elaborately and only one thing could have made it possible, the Tardis was here or had left him here either with or without his knowledge or consent, for him to find her, since he'd known to contact her.

"So what does Mickey think?"

"That he should come down and join you, you're too close to him Rose, if it isn't him, you'll want him to be and you may say something out of place."