The following morning, the new assistant of the professor for planetary sciences happily joined her superior in his office. It was fairly big for one person alone and thus, fitted an additional helper such as Sarah with ease. However, the furniture was not as much the Doctor's as it was the one of his predecessor, who had inadvertently passed all of it onto his replacement. Among the many items the Doctor had inherited were a big oak desk, a comfortable office chair, two tall book shelves filled with literature about practically everything the study of planets, including their own, covered, and an old, oval mirror which was currently standing in a corner of the room, facing the wall.
Only a few minutes after Sarah and the Doctor had finished to set up her workplace, the phone on the big desk rang. He shot the apparatus an annoyed glance, then looked at his friend: "From the next time on, you're going to take these calls for me, all right?" But for now, the Doctor still answered the phone himself. "Dr. Anthony Smith at Amberton university."
Sarah stifled her instinctive reaction to wince at the fake name.
But after the caller had given his introduction and his request, he glanced over to his assistant once more.
"Yes, she's here. I'll pass you over." He passed the receiver to Sarah as promised, and at the same time used the opportunity to tell her about the caller's identity. "There's a Mr. Sullivan who wants to talk to you."
"Hello, Harry.", Sarah greeted the medical officer once the phone was in her hands, smiling happily to hear from him. As she began the conversation, the Doctor sat back down behind his desk to do some work, seemingly disinterested to listen in on them.
"Was that him? That voice…!", a perplexed man stammered at the other end of the line. "Gosh, the old chap's come back after all, has he?"
Sarah licked her lips and thought of her answer carefully, because the Doctor was still in the room with her and might become suspicious if he noticed they were talking of him. "Yes, you've heard correctly.", she assured her friend.
"Well, how's he doing?"
"He's fine as far as I can tell.", replied Sarah, then dropped a hint for Harry before he continued to ask questions that were more difficult to answer in the Doctor's presence. "Listen, Harry, I hope you realize that I'm short-spoken."
"Oh, yes, of course! Sorry, old girl, you're absolutely right.", he finally understood. "The Brig told me his memory's all scrambled. I hope you haven't told him too much about his past life yet. If he isn't ready to believe you now, it might accidentally drive him and his old self further apart. We'll have to give him time, you know?"
Sarah looked at the Doctor out of the corner of her eye. He read through an appropriation request he had formulated the other day and as he leant back, Sarah wondered whether he was going to lift his feet and place them on the desk in front of him. To her disappointment, he did not.
"Yes, I sort of thought so. Don't worry, I had planned to consult you later today anyway. I would have done so yesterday, but it was getting too late. You didn't think I would have let you miss out on the good news?"
Harry just chuckled in response, and so she continued: "So, is there something else I can help you with?"
"Indeed, there is." There was the sound of someone rustling through a stack of papers in the background. "A minister, called George Patton, has just vanished and… we still haven't got a single clue about what happened to any of the missing people. So the Brigadier and I have done some thinking and we figured that you could take a look around the minister's office, and maybe bring the Doctor along, too. You know, the two of you always find something."
"Are you sure it's not too early for that?"
"Well, he doesn't have to help us if he doesn't want to. Only if he's interested."
Sarah pictured Harry shrugging as he spoke.
"All right, I'll ask him. Hang on." More instinctively than necessary, she covered the receiver with a hand and looked over to the Doctor. "Doctor? You've been wondering about my journalist life, right?"
Intrigued by her words, the professor looked up from the paper.
Sarah put her elbows on the table in front of her and leaned forward, smiling. "Harry's just called me up because there's still a case unsolved and he wants me to help. Would you be interested to tag along? It's about a minister that has vanished and we'll be looking around his office for clues."
He raised his eyebrows, surprised. "You're authorized to do that?"
"Harry is with UNIT, so it's okay."
"Hm, UNIT...", He pondered for a moment and Sarah saw in his eyes that he had recognized the word. Not everyone knew about the paramilitary organization, but he should. "Yes, sure. I'd love to. It's just that I have to hold another lecture this afternoon and I mustn't skip it. We can go later, though, if that's okay with them.", he said shortly before going back to working on his appropriation request.
A frown of disappointment forced its way on Sarah's face. His response had not been as excited as she had hoped it would be. The Doctor Sarah knew would have dropped everything at once and run to it. He would have preferred an investigation over paperwork any time! Actually, his answer had been very… ordinary. An answer like any other professor with responsibilities would have given her. She had not come to know her friend as a very responsible person, though. Yet despite her inner unwillingness to do so, she saw herself forced to accept it. She discussed the matter with Harry briefly and they settled on the late afternoon to meet at the minister's office.
The rest of the day passed, albeit slowly, and eventually they did as planned and drove out to the minister's residence together. Along with the sight of the old building, they were met with the presence of a single military vehicle, which might have been the one Harry had brought with him. As usual, the Brigadier had other duties to attend to, but at least the medical officer would be there. As Sarah walked through the entrance up a staircase and the Doctor was following her, she passed by two UNIT soldiers in their green uniforms. Apparently, they were here to ensure that, after the minister had been reported missing, the place he was last seen at remained untouched by strangers – like a proper crime scene.
Knowing that Harry was already waiting for the two assistant investigators inside of the minister's office, Sarah had build up some expectation. How would the Doctor react when he met him again? From the telephone call before, she knew he had not recognized Harry's name or voice, but hopefully the sight of the younger man would trigger some proper piece of memory.
As they entered the room, she found the medical officer leaning against a chest of drawers with his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his jacket, but now that he had heard the door opening, he stood up straight to come and greet them. "Hello, Sarah.", welcomed Harry her, smiling warmly, before he turned towards the long-lost time traveller. "Hello, Doctor." Under different circumstances, he probably would have added something like 'Nice to you see you again!', Sarah figured.
Almost as if it was their first introduction ever, the Doctor shook hands with him. "You're Harry Sullivan, I presume?" He tilted his head and squinted his eyes while he studied Harry's face for a moment.
"...Have we met somewhere before?"
"Oh, I wouldn't know, Sir.", the younger man quickly lied, and with a shrug, folded his hands behind his back.
His reply, however, had only caused the Doctor to give it some more thought.
"You know I think… Weren't you that clumsy chap whom I helped to finish his dissertation at Birmingham? I put my own title on the line for you, didn't I?", he wondered aloud and behind his back, Sarah sighed without a sound to show her disappointment to Harry.
"I wouldn't think so. You see, Doctor, I was trained at the Royal Navy.", the Lieutenant explained in a very humble tone and with a lowly smile. "I may have a medical degree, but none of great academic value, I'm afraid."
"Harry's only allowed to work on the sailors.", Sarah teased, and got an annoyed glance from said medical officer in return, which in turn caused her to chuckle.
But the exchange between the two companions remained disregarded by the Time Lord who was still lost in thought.
"Strange, I could have sworn we have met before...", Sarah heard him mumbling and she deemed that it was good if he kept rustling through his own memory. The Doctor was a clever man; Once he would begin to realize himself that his memories were all messed up, he might be able to help them to help him.
But despite their efforts, this meeting was not supposed to turn into an undercover therapy session. "Anyway, Harry; why have you brought us to this office?", the young woman asked, just to remind them of UNIT's current investigation.
"This is the place George Patton was last seen in. Apparently he came in here to do some paperwork, but never left the office again. I've been looking around for a bit already, but everything seems in order..." With another clueless shrug, Harry left the matter to the investigative journalist.
She took a first quick glance around the room. It was a very big, almost luxurious office with three large, interconnected windows framed by heavy curtains, an antique desk and a Turkish carpet. To the sides stood several large cabinets made from the same wood as the desk, as well as a chest of drawers to each side and a single hat stand. The whole room looked very tidy in general, and clean too, save for a thin layer of dust in the corners here and there.
"It's not necessarily something out of order that we're looking for.", she taught her friend from the Royal Navy as she began to wander around. "What we like to know is what happened just before the minister vanished, right?"
Harry walked a few steps with her, but then stopped in the middle of the room and crossed his arms. "Well, they say everything's been the same as ever. No strange noises or happenings. Besides, they claim that there is no way out of this building without someone noticing." After a moment of hesitation, he chuckled. "Now I say, I don't think that's true, because apparently, it happened."
Before Sarah went back to examine the minister's desk, she glanced over to the Doctor, who was just leaning against one of the cabinets, but scanning the room by himself. She wondered if he had noticed it, too; How tidy the desk was. Except for a single stray paper clamp and the cap of a pen missing its counterpart, every thing sat at its place. Through simple deduction, Sarah figured that at the time of the vanishing the minister had not been working. However, he had gone missing after spending some time in here. Naturally, you would assume that he spent the time working. Maybe there were more clues around which could support her assumption…
Against the bottom part of the filing cabinet next to the hat stand leaned a closed briefcase. As her sight fell on it, she wondered if this was an unusual place to put a briefcase when everything else was so tidy. The final hint for her, however, was a bowler hat resting on the corner of the desk which was closest to the hat stand.
"I think that the minister was just about to leave when he vanished...", Sarah then decided to tell her friends. "This desk doesn't look like it was used at the time. And the briefcase, the hat... Imagine he cleans up his desk, and as he prepares to leave he puts down his briefcase and the hat first while he hangs his coat or something."
"That's not a bad thought, Sarah!", the Doctor praised her and looked at her with his eyebrows raised, as though he had never pieced a better chain of assumptions together himself. "I must say, I find it surprising that you want to give up journalism to go to university..."
Sarah put on a smile for him. "Just broadening my horizon, Doctor."
He pushed himself away from the cabinet and with a few steps, walked into the middle of the room to stop next to Harry. His eyes focused on something past Sarah; an empty patch of wall between the chest of drawers with the hat stand in front of it and a filing cabinet. "But… have you also noticed that there's something missing here?", asked the Doctor.
Sarah turned to look at the wall. The faded colour of wallpaper showed no indication that something was missing, but he was still right. The room looked unbalanced. One wall was lined with furniture and this one was, too, except for the aforementioned space.
The Time-Lord-turned-professor moved a bit closer to the wall and ran a hand over the structure of the wallpaper to feel for inconsistencies in the imprinting. Eventually, he pointed out to his companion two small holes in the wall above his eye height. "A frame with a picture in it, I'd say?" As he turned and tilted his head into Sarah's direction, a bit of a smug expression had found its way onto his face.
"That's no place for a painting!", Harry suddenly intervened, which caused both of them to look at him surprised.
"And why is that?", the Doctor demanded to know.
The medical officer joined them in front of the wall. "We already know that the minister was leaving, don't we? He was probably off to discuss financial matters over dinner with the premier or something." While speaking he glanced back and forth between his friends. "If I was him, I would put a big mirror next to my hat stand. I mean, to a minister, the success of a negotiation may depend on his looks."
For a few moments, all three of them went silent. They looked together at the wallpaper, probably trying to imagine the mirror hanging there. Eventually, the Doctor turned to Harry with a big, joyful grin. "Why, that's a very good observation! Wouldn't you say it's a good observation?" He gave him a pat on the shoulder, before glancing back at Sarah for quick reassurance. "Well done, Harry!", he concluded.
"Thank you, Doctor."
Harry was beaming with pride as though his superior had just offered him a new badge for his uniform. For all Sarah knew, he was right to be smiling like that, because during their time of travelling together, he had rarely ever gotten any praise. Half the time Harry had just tried not to press the wrong button again.
As the Doctor stepped past them and turned on his heels, she could see by the excited twinkle in his eyes that he wanted to know more. "But now, doesn't this beg the question: If the minister vanished as he looked into the mirror, what happened to the mirror?", he asked his companions.
"I suggest we ask the minister's secretary about it.", Sarah replied. If there had really been a mirror, someone from around the place could tell them.
They left the office and walked back downstairs to chat with the personnel on the ground floor. Indeed, there had been a mirror: An antique, half-blind kind of thing according to the secretary. And yes, they knew that they had not been allowed to take it down, but it was to be picked up for restoration today and to keep it out of the way of UNIT, the mirror had been brought into the basement even before the soldiers had arrived. Realizing now that this was probably a very grave mistake, the elderly secretary apologized to them several times.
Due to the Doctor's growing impatience to see the mirror, he suggested that they should find it themselves. Instead of taking the lead as he always used to do, he waited for Harry and Sarah to find the door to the basement first. It was then that the medical officer had to discover that it was sheer impossible to find one's way around a building one has never been in. He took them into the wrong direction once, then headed back to the reception to ask for the right way. While the Doctor sighed annoyed by the delay, Sarah chuckled. She knew, the Doctor's sense of orientation was nowhere better than Harry's, but he had such a confident to deal with it.