‘The TARDIS has… basements…?’
‘Is it the Crown Jewels?’ said Amy. ‘Did you get us the Crown Jewels for our wedding?’
‘Even better.’
The Doctor vanished momentarily and came back holding something behind his back. He pulled it out.
‘Ta-da!’
It was a plant in a pot. Quite a pretty plant. A tulip
with striped, coloured petals. The pot was quite nice too. But still. Amy and Rory looked at each other, and then at the Doctor.
‘You brought us a… tulip?’ said Rory.
‘Doctor, did you just stop off at the local Time Petrol Station and pick up a potted plant before you got here?’
The Doctor’s face crumpled. He looked, momentarily, very sad and very old.
‘Don’t you know what this is? Don’t you know that, at the height of its wealth and fame one bulb of this very rare, very special, practically unique tulip would have cost more than… what’s the name of the place you keep your outdated mostly ornamental figureheads? The ones that cost all the money in upkeep?’
‘Er, the British Museum?’ guessed Rory.
‘Buckingham Palace! Yes! One single bulb of this glorious variegated tulip would have cost more than Buckingham Palace! Well,’ he conceded, ‘maybe not that much, maybe not quite that much but close! Someone paid two tons of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese and twelve fat sheep for this! And the rest!’
Rory and Amy stared at the tulip with a little more respect but not much more understanding.
‘Honestly, don’t you know anything about human history?’
Amy blinked.
‘I didn’t do History GCSE. I did Spanish instead.’
‘Right!’ said the Doctor, turning on his heel and marching into the TARDIS. ‘Come with me!’
They followed, bemused, into the TARDIS console room. Rory brought Amy’s beach bag with them. He had a feeling they wouldn’t be coming back.
‘Bubbles!’ shouted the Doctor. ‘It’s all about bubbles!’
‘As in…’ Rory ventured, ‘I’m forever blowing…’
‘No, Rory, as in money. The thing your species is so obsessed with: making it, saving it, borrowing it, spending it. Because money is the best vehicle ever invented for greed. Honestly, you know, you really are all just so irrational. You always want to believe you can get something for nothing, that there’s some kind of magic power…’
‘What, like a raggedy Doctor in a magic box?’ said Amy.
‘No, not like that, not like that at all. In fact, I am going to take you somewhere that you can see how very not like that it is. Do you see this tulip, Amy?’
Amy looked at the tulip. It was a tulip. It had striped red and yellow petals with frilly edges and a long green stem. A tulip.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know why this tulip bulb ended up being worth so much?’
‘No.’
‘It’s because, Amy,’ he put his face very close to hers, ‘people thought that other people thought it was worth that much. They thought they could sell it for more than they bought it for. They thought that the market for tulip bulbs was so good that prices would keep on rising for ever.’
‘But… it’s just a flower.’
‘That is exactly the point! The point is, you people aren’t rational about these things. And that’s why…’ He typed furiously on a keyboard on the TARDIS console.
‘Oh yes, very good, there was an example of just this kind of thinking in your time! We - he gestured dramatically - ‘are going to see a bank collapse!’
‘We’re going to a bank?’ said Rory.
‘Not just any bank,’ said the Doctor, throwing a lever on the TARDIS console. ‘We’re going to the scene of the biggest banking collapse your species has ever known!
Lexington International Bank!’
With a flourish so dramatic that it spun him around in a circle, the Doctor pinged two buttons, wound a handle and pulled a knob. The central column of the console began to rise and fall. They were off.
‘I suppose the holiday’s over then,’ said Rory.
Chapter
3
London’s Square Mile. Here money is conjured and traded, here careers are made and broken, this is the beating heart of capitalism. Along the pavements of the Square Mile stride purposeful women and men with immaculate suits and very short lunch breaks. In the offices of the Square Mile sit people whose days are determined by the movements of lines on a graph. In the boardrooms of the Square Mile are debated the mergers and acquisitions, the divestments and dispensations by which companies and corporations around the world will grow or be dismantled: here decisions are made which will result in a sleepy village turning into a thriving factory town, or a busy industrial city turning into a wasteland of poverty and decay. And nowhere do the women and men stride more purposefully, nowhere are the graphs observed in more minute detail, nowhere are the boardroom debates fiercer or more significant than in the offices of Lexington International Bank.
Here, the atrium is large and the glass sculpture
expressing the motto ‘time is money’ is enormous. The receptionists are immaculate in identical uniforms. No one would think of striding purposefully through the reception area without carrying a file or two labelled with names that made it very clear how tremendously important they were and how extremely hard they were working.
But nowhere is impregnable. Not even Lexington International Bank.
In the basement of Lexington, there is a loud and busy mailroom. And off the mailroom, there is a maze of dusty corridors and certain damp storerooms which even the mailroom staff rarely visit. And in one of those damp storerooms, the one with the broken photocopier and the plastic mail sacks full of folded up plastic mail sacks, and the copies of misprinted Annual Reports from 1998, in that farthest storeroom there is a noise.
The noise is vworp, vworp, vworp.
And then, in the farthest storeroom, there is a blue box with a light on top.
The Doctor opened the TARDIS door and strode out.
‘Come on! The air’s breathable, the gravity’s normal, just my little joke, the air’s full of dust actually and the gravity’s… well, yes the gravity is normal, although…
what are you wearing?’
‘Just something I found in the wardrobe room.
Coming to a bank, have to dress the part. Do you like it?’
Amy gave a twirl. She was wearing a business suit -
a jacket, blouse, short skirt and a pair of glasses.
‘But you don’t wear glasses,’ said the Doctor.
Amy pushed the glasses down her nose slightly and looked over them at him.
‘They’re just for effect, Doctor. The effect is: I’m very smart and know a lot about numbers, OK? Rory’s is worse.’
Rory stumbled out of the TARDIS wearing what was definitely a suit but was also definitely about four sizes too big for him. He looked like his mum had given him his older brother’s suit hoping he’d grow into it. If his older brother had been part ogre.
He looked at the Doctor and rolled his eyes. ‘It was all I could find.’
The Doctor tried to hide his smirk, and turned on his heel. ‘Come along!’ he said, ‘places to go, people to meet, history to teach! Now… which way, which way…’
He poked his head out of the door of the storeroom, looked left and right and marched out, leading Amy and Rory towards a door opening onto the street outside.
‘But,’ said Rory, ‘isn’t this the building? Shouldn’t we go back inside to, you know, be in the building we came for?’
‘Now, now, Rory,’ said the Doctor, ‘this is Lexington International Bank! Can’t just sneak in the back! Have to be announced at reception! We have to…’
‘Please,’ said a voice by their feet. ‘Please…’
The Doctor stopped. Looked down. Frowned.
Huddled at the side of the building was an old woman. She was sitting under a heating ve
nt, where it was warm. She was wrapped in three or four dirty coats, although she was wearing a pair of expensive-looking high-heeled shoes with red soles. She looked so tired, as though she hadn’t slept for days, or weeks. Her long
hair was dirty too, and there was a tattered canvas bag next to her which she obviously used as a pillow.
She tugged at the Doctor’s coat. Rory was already patting his pockets to find his wallet.
‘Please,’ she said again, ‘can you help me?’
Rory pulled a sheaf of notes out of his wallet and bent down to give them to her. It was funny how, living in the TARDIS and travelling with the Doctor, money began to feel less important, even meaningless. There were seemingly limitless supplies of all kinds of exotic alien currencies piled up in some of the TARDIS’s rooms - the Doctor had even told them that one jungle room populated by small pink snail-like creatures was actually a functioning economy he’d picked up on the planet Gigia 8 - but they never found anything much to spend money on, and the things they did and saw couldn’t have been bought at any price. He’d brought loads of money, just in case, but now he only carried his wallet out of habit, and this woman needed its contents more than he did.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘have this.’ He handed her the notes.
She looked at them, puzzled. She was obviously a bit potty, poor thing.
‘Time is money,’ she muttered, ‘time is money, money is time, you can give me one but you can’t give the other.’
Amy looked at Rory with respect. She’d mocked him for bringing along a wallet full of cash. But this was a good thing to do with it. She kissed him on the side of his head, then knelt down, and spoke gently: ‘How long have you been here?’
The woman frowned at Amy. ‘How long is time?’
she said. ‘How long is a day? How long can a day be?
Longer than you think!’
Amy and Rory looked at each other, then back at the Doctor.
‘I don’t know how you bear it,’ said the Doctor. ‘I don’t know how you humans go on bearing this, but somehow you do. That was kind, Rory. Now come along, we’ve got a bank to investigate.’
‘Don’t go back in there!’ the woman shouted. ‘Don’t go in there! They’ll steal your time! They’ll steal it, and you’ll never get it back, not never ever.’
The Doctor spun around and knelt down again.
‘What did you say? What was that you said about time?
Say it again, more slowly this time.’
The old woman stared at the Doctor. Her mouth twisted. She blinked, and scrunched up her face and grimaced. ‘Can’t remember,’ she said. ‘My brain is so old. Wait!’
She hoisted the canvas bag onto her lap and rummaged around in it. There was something horrible in there, possibly a gone-off banana and some extremely old fish, judging by the smell. At last, she pulled out a startlingly clean white rectangle of cardboard.
‘There!’ she said, pressing it into the Doctor’s hand.
Then, speaking as if by rote, she said: ‘Do take my card, it has all my contact details and my secretary will be happy to make an appointment, we’re very grateful for your interest in Lexington International Bank.’
Over the Doctor’s head, Amy and Rory looked at each other. She was clearly doolally. But the Doctor replied respectfully: ‘Thank you Ms, er,’ he consulted the card, ‘thank you Nadia Montgomery, Head of
Communications and Marketing, that’s quite important, thank you so much, we’ll be in touch! Won’t we?’
Oh yes, nodded Rory and Amy, we certainly will.
As they walked around the building to the front entrance, Amy said: ‘What was that about, Doctor?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor, ‘but I have a feeling we’re going to find out.’
‘I’m the Doctor,’ said the Doctor, leaning over the polished granite desk and smiling at the receptionist, ‘and these are my two charming friends, Rory and Amy.
We’re all expected, as I think you’ll be able to tell from our credentials, which are here,’ he produced the psychic paper and held it up in front of the receptionist’s face.
‘As you can see we have an absolute right to be in this building and wander around at will, poking our noses into this, examining that, it’s all part of our job as our paperwork indicates.’
The receptionist examined the paper and smiled.
‘Doctor Schmidt,’ she said, warmly. ‘The efficiency auditor we’ve been expecting from Zurich. I’ll just call up to tell Ms Laing-Randall that you’re here. I know she’s eager to talk to you. Shell show you around the building.’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor leaned back against the desk and grinned. ‘That’s exactly right.’
‘And this must be your assistant,’ the receptionist smiled, a shade less warmly, at Amy. ‘I’ll make up your security passes but…’ The Doctor tried to pull the psychic paper out of the receptionist’s hands, but Lexington International Bank trains its staff extremely well in security matters, and the receptionist, still smiling
brightly, held on tightly. ‘Now, let me see, what does it say here about you?’ she said, staring hard at Rory.
Rory shuffled uncomfortably in his too-large suit. He didn’t look like one of the sharply dressed executives marching through the lobby in search of new meetings to conquer, and the receptionist knew it. She stared at him, then back down at the psychic paper.
‘As you’ll see,’ said the Doctor again, ‘like us, he’s perfectly entitled to go wherever he pleases in the building, talk to anyone… and if I’m Doctor Schmidt,’
he put on a cod Swiss accent, ‘ze auditor from Zurich, can I get avay viz zat accent?’
‘Not really, Doctor,’ said Amy.
‘No, no, didn’t think so, didn’t think it was a good idea at all, but really,’ he continued to the receptionist, ‘if I’m the incredibly un-Swiss Doctor Schmidt and this is Amy my assistant then Rory must be….’
‘Oh yes,’ said the receptionist, her face clearing. ‘I see it here now. He’s the new mailroom boy.’
‘Mailroom…?’ spluttered Rory.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Doctor, ‘very good, you go down to the mailroom, Rory. I’m sure there’ll be lots of useful things for you to discover. Paperclips, you know, jiffy bags, important staple guns, you never know what could be useful.’
Rory tried to protest, but a helpful security guard was already ushering him through the door marked ‘basement’.
‘As you can see, Doctor Schmidt,’ said Vanessa Laing-Randall, ‘we run a tight ship here.’
‘Just call me Doctor, everyone does.’
Ms Laing-Randall, immaculate in an extremely expensive-looking suit, stretched one manicured hand out to indicate the glass walls of the internal atrium. She was a woman with the powerful psychological presence of a tank, combined with the sleek grooming of a racing car.
She’d met them in the lobby, followed by her scurrying assistant Jane Blythe, and had taken them on a whirlwind tour of the building: trading rooms and personnel department, management offices, secretaries, private banking. Amy had the impression that, in spite of her politeness, Vanessa rather resented their presence.
‘You know the Chancellor of the Exchequer will be giving a speech from this office tomorrow afternoon?
Because we are a model for the industry, a model for sustainable growth and commitment to our values,’ she was saying to the Doctor. ‘I know New York has insisted on audits; but I really don’t think we need it. See that sculpture?’
They were looking down on the lobby - the building was circular with a glass roof above the central well.
There was an enormous glass sculpture in the centre, reaching up to the eighth floor. It looked like several half-melted candles twisted around each other and fused together, with tendrils and strands reaching up.
There was a strange flickering light at its heart. It looked weirdly alive.
‘Nice sculpture, yes. Art and money,’ said the Doctor, ‘money and
art. They’ve gone together since the Medici of course. Banking family. Italian renaissance.
Commissioned a lot of art because they thought that was the only way to save their souls from hell. They thought
that charging compound interest was a terrible sin, you know. And that God would only forgive them if they used their money to pay for enormous pieces of religious art. Piero de Medici died tragically of Urharborean Plague, but I don’t think that was God, more a side effect of some temporal flux caused by Mandragora. Anyway, don’t need to go on about that, forget I mentioned it really, what I mean to say is: nice sculpture.’
‘That’s not just a sculpture,’ said Vanessa, ‘it’s a mission statement. See, the different strands represent the different parts of one’s life, and here at Lexington Bank London we believe that each part deserves equal attention. As part of our work-life balance initiative, we…’
She droned on. Amy leaned over the balustrade and looked around the building. Up and down its ten floors, through all the windows, she could see busy bankers working like bees, each in their own little cell. Actually, this place was more like a beehive than anything else.
Every little worker with its own allotted job. And Vanessa Laing-Randall wasn’t a tank or a sports car, she was a Queen Bee. The whole place was running so efficiently it was hard to believe what the Doctor had told them: that the Bank had taken on too much debt, that it would collapse only a few days from now. ‘We won an award last quarter, you know. For our commitment to giving our staff time for family activities, for leisure…’ Vanessa Laing-Randall was still giving the Doctor the hard sell.
But maybe she was right. All the workers in the different offices looked so peaceful. Except. Hmm.
Directly opposite her, in the glass-walled office that looked out over the central well on the other side, there
was a balding middle-aged man who looked in some kind of distress. He’d stood up from his computer, both hands covering his face. A woman ran in from the office next door. He shouted at her - Amy couldn’t hear what he said - and she backed away quickly. He turned toward the central well and Amy saw his face. He was middle-aged, quite nice-looking, but full of anger and fear. In desperation, it seemed to Amy, he looked down at his wrist, and what he saw there made him no happier. He fiddled with whatever-it-was on his wrist.
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