Life on Mars: Blood, Bullets and Blue Stratos. Tom Graham

tunnel of light; a terrifying theme tune that sounded like the scream of a killer robot; a sofa behind which he felt compelled to hide.

      The man glanced anxiously about, then clambered frantically to the crest of a heap of twisted girders to get a wider view. A blue police box slowly materialized in the flat base of a valley amid the wreckage. The sound ceased, and for some moments the box sat silent and inert. Then the door opened, and a woman emerged – the woman, the woman whose face he could see in his mind’s eye but whose name had completely eluded him.

      ‘Annie …’ The man breathed, and his heart leapt at the sight of her. ‘Annie Cartwright …’

      But she was not quite as he remembered her. Her dark hair had turned mousy blonde; she was dressed in a drab pinafore dress and dull, floral-pattern blouse the man was sure he had never seen her wear before. Why? Why had she made herself look like Jo Grant from some old episode of Doctor Who?

      ‘Where are we?’ she said, speaking to somebody behind her. ‘Doctor?’

      Like Annie, Jon Pertwee had changed too. The grey bouffant was the same, as was the velvet smoking jacket, ruffled shirt and floppy bowtie; but the gut was stouter, the chest more barrel-like, the stance more confrontational, the aftershave more potent. The hair and costume were the Doctor’s, but the man inside them was an altogether different animal.

      The man in the leather jacket felt a sickening lurch of recognition. That was him, that was the fella – it was the guv.

      ‘What is this place, Doctor?’ Annie asked.

      ‘A chuffing shite-hole, luv,’ Doctor Hunt replied, scowling about at the bleak landscape. ‘Looks like I’m going to have reprogram the TARDIS’s intergalactic coordinator circuits with the toe of my size-twelve boot.’

      ‘We’re not staying, then?’

      ‘Not unless you fancy taking a slash in the gravel like a white-arsed collie. C’mon, luv – bounce your clout back in the box and get us a brew on the go.’

      He smacked Annie’s backside as she disappeared back into the TARDIS, then jammed a half-smoked panatella into his gob as he took one last, unimpressed look around.

      ‘Gene!’ the man in the leather jacket cried out, the name coming to him in flash. ‘Gene Hunt! Guv. Wait. Don’t go.’

      Gene sucked on the cigar, oblivious of the man’s cries.

      ‘Gene! Please! Don’t leave me here!’

      Gene disappeared inside the TARDIS and slammed the door. A heartbeat later, the police box began to dematerialize.

      ‘No! Wait, Guv! It’s me! Don’t leave me here! We’re a team! We’re a team, you rotten bastard!’

      Just before the TARDIS disappeared entirely, the doors opened enough to reveal Gene’s hand, two fingers flicking a ‘V’, before they and the blue police box evaporated entirely.

      ‘Don’t leave me here. I want to go home!’

      All at once he was struggling against something that smothered and suffocated him, and in the next moment he found himself caught up in tangled bed sheets, his face sunk deep into a sweat-soaked pillow. He sat up, getting his breath back, and glared about him, momentarily shocked to find that the wasteland of rubble had been replaced with the familiar surroundings of his flat: beige and brown wallpaper, flower-patterned lampshades, a huge black-and-white TV with clunky buttons, a hot-water boiler that took forever to warm up. Beyond his nicotine-coloured curtains, a cold grey day was dawning over Manchester. From some distant street came the wail of a panda car. Somebody in a nearby flat was playing ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ on a tinny transistor radio.

      Home.

      The man clambered slowly from the tangled sheets, padded across the rough nylon carpet, and confronted himself in the bathroom mirror. What he saw was a face just the right side of forty, with narrow, thoughtful features starting to bear the lines of too many worries, too many unresolved dilemmas, too many restless nights.

      ‘It was just another bad dream,’ the face told him. ‘Don’t let it rattle you.’

      He ran his hand across his close-trimmed hair, ruffled the jagged fringe running across his high forehead.

      ‘You know exactly who you are. Your name is Sam Tyler.’

      Above his narrow, thoughtful eyes, the brows knotted anxiously. He rubbed at them to smooth out the lines.

      ‘You are Detective Inspector Sam Tyler of CID, A-Division.’

      Detective Inspector. The rank still irked him. Back in 2006, he had been a fully fledged DCI – a detective chief inspector. It had been DCI Tyler who had pulled his car over to the side of the road, David Bowie blaring out of the dashboard MP3 player. It had been DCI Tyler who had stepped out of the car, trying to clear the tumultuous whirlwind of his thoughts, too preoccupied with his worries to even notice the other vehicle bearing down on him. It had been DCI Tyler who had felt the sudden impact of that vehicle, followed at once by the equally sudden impact of the tarmac. It had been DCI Tyler who had lain there, eyes unfocused, his consciousness ebbing away, the voice of Bowie penetrating the blankness that seemed to be overtaking him.

       And her friend is nowhere to be seen

       As she walks through a sunken dream

      ‘You know who you are and where you are,’ Sam told himself, looking his reflection firmly in the eye. ‘You are where you belong. Right here. This is your home.’

      His home. Nineteen seventy-three. How strange and alien it had felt when he had first crash-landed here, alone and disoriented like a man from Mars. He had hunted through his pockets for the familiar props of the twenty-first century – the mobile, the BlackBerry, the sheaf of plastic debit cards – and found nothing but ten-pence pieces the size of doubloons and an ID card informing him that he was no longer a DCI but a detective inspector transferred down to Manchester from Hyde. He had tugged at his winged shirt collars and the tops of the Chelsea boots that he found himself wearing, and blundered like a zombie through the once-familiar police station that should have been buzzing with PC terminals and air-conditioning units but was now heavy with the clacking of typewriters and the sparking-up of cigarette lighters.

      ‘This is my office – here!’ he had bellowed, surrounded by blank, uncomprehending faces. ‘This is my department! What have you done with it?’

      The answer had not come from the men staring at him. It had come in the form of a deep, phlegmy rumble, and the sound of heavy feet scraping across the floor. The man had turned, and there, lurking like an ogre in the smoke-filled den of his office, had been his new DCI – Gene Hunt, the guv – the shaven stubble of his neck red and inflamed from the raw alcohol that passed as aftershave, his belly bulging at the buttons of his nylon shirt, his stained fingers forever reaching for the next packet of fags, or the next glass of Scotch, or the next villain’s windpipe. He had introduced Sam to his new department with a breathtaking blow to the stomach – ‘Don’t you ever waltz into my kingdom acting king of the jungle!’ – and oriented him in Time and Space with a little less technical detail than Einstein or Hawking. ‘It’s 1973. Almost dinnertime. I’m ’avin’ hoops.’ And Sam, slowly but surely, had come to realize that he could be happy here. This place had life – hot, stinking, roaring, filthy, balls-to-the-wall life.

      It also had Annie.

      Sam ran water into the basin and splashed it across his face, thinking of Annie Cartwright. From the very moment he’d first met her, he had felt a connection, a conviction that, of all the strange characters populating his new world, she was the one he could trust the most. And in time she had become the bright heart of his universe around which everything else orbited. It was her as much as anything else in this place that he had missed so bitterly when he had returned to 2006, and it was her face that had been foremost in his mind when he had leapt so joyfully from the rooftop and plunged back into