There were ten beds, five down each side of the room. The women who had occupied them for a short time remained where they had collapsed during their attack on the young man. Heaped on top of one another at the far end, they were obviously dead.

The Doctor moved to examine them. “See here?” he asked Ace.

Ace looked where the Doctor was pointing, at the nose of one woman whose sightless eyes disturbed her greatly. The nose was red as if the victim had been suffering from a very bad cold.

“She breathed in the spores of the Garantalia,” the Doctor explained. “They all did. It’s a giant fungal flower that grows in space. In most animal species the spores cause madness and death. Did you not wonder why I poked holes in that wall with my umbrella?”

“I thought you were bored,” said Ace.

“I’m very rarely bored,” said the Doctor.

“So,” began Ace, thinking things through. “Are you saying the wall had spores of this fungus growing in it?”

“Not growing, no,” the Doctor said. “The spores can’t grow on planets, only in space. They would have been brought here inadvertently. On the hull of a visiting ship, perhaps. There won’t have been many.”

“We’ve got ten corpses in this room, Professor,” Ace pointed out. “Are there going to be more?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Not here. Not today.”

“You knew,” said Ace. “How did you know?”

The Doctor was moving from body to body, gently closing their eyes. “I had my ear to the wall.”

“Not funny, Professor,” Ace snapped.

“The TARDIS was my ear,” the Doctor countered. “If she’d got us here sooner, I might have been able to do something, to arrest the action of the spores before it was too late.”

“It was too late, though, wasn’t it? You didn’t think to tell me before?”

“The spores might not have caused any problems at all,” the Doctor said. “It wasn’t meant to be, our coming here and fixing things. This could have been a very uneventful and boring landing for us. I didn’t know it was going to be anything else until after we arrived.”

“Like I believe that,” Ace muttered. “You just said you’re never bored.”

The Doctor frowned. “I said I’m rarely bored, Ace. Not never.”

“So what do we tell this Mr Smith and the other one?”

“Jarvis?” asked the Doctor. Ace nodded. “We tell them that this was an outbreak of hysterical illness, possibly some kind of influenza having weakened the mind’s hold on reality.”

“And they’ll believe that, why?” Ace asked.

“Because these are women, Ace,” the Doctor said quietly. “They live in an age when women, apart from Queen Vic as you call her, don’t count for much. More than that, these ten women were poor. Nobody cared about them.”

“Sad.”

“The few who do care, about women like these, about all those in poverty, tend to think building these workhouses, supposedly for them, that’s as much as they have to do. They pat themselves on the back. They won’t go looking for complicated answers when simple ones will serve their purpose and allow them to bury these poor souls in paupers’ graves.”

“That’s more than sad, that’s horrible,” said Ace.

“I didn’t write your history,” the Doctor replied.

“Are you sure about that, Professor?”

“If I did,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t build places like this.”