The next Monday came, as Mondays always did – although no one ever wanted them to – and Sarah was already in the Doctor's office to forward a student's letter regarding the exam results of the last semester to the university office. The professor she was assisting was a bit late today, which was not as surprising if you considered how bored he had gotten with the daily routine.

When he eventually entered, it was about an hour later than usual and he looked tired and annoyed as he flopped into the big office chair at his desk. Sarah immediately noticed the new scarf wrapped around his neck. Even after he had hung his jacket, the scarf stayed on. His old habits caused Sarah to chuckle quietly to herself. Just as she intended to ask where that grouchy morning mood of his had come from, the question answered itself: The Doctor sneezed violently, then shook his head as if he had to recover from the strange and sudden motion his body had forced him into.

"Bless you!" Sarah called out. "Caught a cold, have you? I told you it was chilly outside."

At first he shot her a glare, but was then forced to avert another oncoming sneeze. Which he managed to do, albeit barely. "That's the fault of that chap, your friend, Harry.", the Doctor finally got out. "I told him not to let go of the rope until I had secured it, but he wasn't listening." Since he was talking now anyway, the sneeze he had prevented earlier eventually got the better of him.

"Bless you again!", his assistant replied with instinctive politeness, before she picked the conversation back up. "What rope? How come you've met Harry and I don't know any of it?" Since she considered herself part of a team, naturally, she didn't like to think that she had been left out.

"We took a boat trip this weekend.", her sniffling friend continued to explain. "I had this idea, that, maybe I could discover sailing for me. Since you told me that Harry was trained at the Royal Navy, I figured he might know someone with a boat who wouldn't mind me messing about with. He liked the idea so much that he wanted to join. Hasn't set a foot on a ship for so long, he might have become a landlubber, he said." After rubbing his nose with a handkerchief, the Doctor lifted himself back up from his chair to fetch a book from one of the shelves. All of his movements looked as though he was dragging himself, quite unwilling to do anything but to drop down and sleep for three days in a row.

Sarah leaned with her elbows on her very own desk and watched him. Quite honestly, she felt a little jealous not to have been invited to their boat trip. "Why didn't you call me up? You know, I'm always in for an adventure!"

"Ha ha! Be glad that we did not!", called out the Doctor as he returned to the office chair. "You're always the one who keeps complaining about the cold and wet weather. We knew you wouldn't enjoy it. And, as it turned out, neither did we!" After arranging a few papers and the book he had fetched, he turned around on the chair to face her. "We weren't going far, just from Brighton out to the sea and then back again, nothing too exciting, with that little sailing boat of Harry's former instructor, a man called Oscar. And thankfully he came with us, too, or things might have gone from bad to worse.", told the Doctor his story, "He left the two of us to the sailing. And so, at one point, Harry was holding a rope – the one which I was just securing with a professional knot. But moments before I was finished, he let go – there was a gust of wind and as the lower yardarm came around, it knocked the two of us straight off the boat into the water." He finished the explanation with a grand sweeping gesture.

"Ah! So that's where you caught your cold.", Sarah figured.

"Oscar fished both of us out the water just minutes after.", the Doctor continued sourly and shivered as he remembered his unintentional swimming lesson in the icy sea. "He called the two of us half-witted fools, dropped us off at Brighton harbour as soon as he could, and, after arguing with Harry about whose fault it was all the way back, I spent the rest of the afternoon in front of his fireplace trying to warm myself up again."

"Hm… And what was his opinion on the matter?"

"Who's? Harry's?"

"Yes."

The university professor shrugged with a lack of understanding. "He claimed that I couldn't tie a proper sailor's knot! Can you believe that? I mean, obviously, HE didn't wait until I was done with it!"

With a lot of effort, the young woman managed to suppress a giggle. That bickering between the two would have been worth enough for her to take that trip to the sea despite the harsh weather. Judging by the ways she knew him, Sarah guessed that the Doctor was mostly just upset about the misadventure, or accident as it were, and merely looking to Harry to find a scapegoat. As he attempted to return to the documents on his desk, he just had to fight down another sneeze, followed by a coughing fit this time. Having watched him long enough now, his assistant generously decided to ease his suffering. "How about I prepare some hot tea for this poor, sick sea dog?", she suggested teasingly and chewed on the cap of her pen for a bit while she awaited his reply.

"I would be very grateful." His voice sounded about as glad as he was tired and annoyed by the illness. For once, he could not even be bothered to smile.

Sarah just got up from her chair to go and fill the office's own kettle with water, when the telephone on her desk rang. Although she hesitated a moment, now that he had almost walked past it already, she eventually decided to pick up after all. "Dr. Smith's office at Amberton university, Sarah Jane Smith speaking.", the assistant politely named the line the caller was connected to.

"Good morning, Sarah. How do you do?", greeted her the familiar voice of the other unlucky sailor, Harry Sullivan. Maybe less surprisingly, he sounded a bit raspy.

"Well, how do you do? You don't sound too well." Sarah glanced back at the sick professor, who now realized that this conversation would probably take a while longer and got up himself to do what she had set out to do for him. "Never mind, Sarah. I'll prepare some for us, then.", he said regarding the tea as he walked across the room. Sarah thanked him, covering the receiver for but a moment before she turned her attention back to Harry.

"It's just a bit of a sore throat, nothing to worry about.", the young officer quickly explained. "I took a dip in the sea on the weekend when I shouldn't have."

"Oh, I've heard all about it already.", his friend chimed in, "And by the way, I'm siding with your skipper. You two have probably been too busy bickering to notice it was the fault of both of you!" Sarah lectured not only Harry, but the former time traveller by accident, too.

The Doctor was not out of the door yet as he heard her words and stopped to shoot her an annoyed glare.
"Is that Harry?", he demanded to know, but then waved his own question aside. "For your sake, I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear your remark right now..." With this grouchy mumbling he eventually left to get the water for the tea.

Harry, too, denied the assistant's accusation.
"We weren't bickering, Sarah. Have you ever seen me bicker with anyone?", he asked calmly.

"Do you expect an honest answer to that?"

"Ah, well… I suppose not.", the Lieutenant answered after a moment's hesitation, then verbally shrugged the topic off. "Any way, don't take it too seriously, old thing. The common cold is far more annoying than lethal these days."

"I'm not taking it seriously. And I'm also still not an 'old thing', Harry!"

==== ==== Harry Sullivan ==== ====

Of course, she had to remind him. But he was already aware how annoyed Sarah got when he called her this, and so Harry smiled to himself, in total awareness that she could not see him at the other end of the line. The way she got upset, almost artificially, had something charming about it, which made it difficult to resist the temptation to tease her every once in a while.

"I'm calling because I have some news and I actually might require the Doctor's help on the case again.", he finally got to the topic he had wanted to tell her about from the start. "You remember when I told you the minister had reappeared out of nowhere? Well, just as UNIT went to finally interrogate him on his vanishing, he strangles his secretary and flees."

"I thought he was a victim, not a culprit...?" asked Sarah, perplexed.

"Yes. Well, no. Obviously not.", Harry quickly changed the subject to get the other recent discovery out before more questions would spring up he could barely answer. "And it gets even stranger. We had a break-out of our storage room."

"I suppose you're telling me this because no one has been locked in there?"

"Of course not. It's all dust and old boxes in there. But the lock was clearly broken from the inside of the room.", he explained briefly at first, then elaborated on the matter as he thought back on his earlier visit to the storage room with Benton. "But here's the thing… it was the storage where we also kept the mirror that had been retrieved from another case of vanishing. And we've just found the minister's, too. They were both in there – Well, they still are." The facts revealed nothing, not the slightest clue to a connection between the strange events and the mirrors, yet there was an undeniable feeling deep inside of Harry now that there had to be one. And he was usually quite a rational person. After all, he had been the one who had pledged to stop looking for a half-blind piece of framed silverware until just a day ago. "So, now either I'm getting paranoid or there's something seriously wrong with mirrors these days...", the Lieutenant admitted to his strange feeling of worry.

At first, the woman at the other end of the line remained quiet, which led him to wonder if she was already working to find the missing link in the case. But all she eventually said was: "Hm… Sounds like you could use a second opinion."

Out of the background noises Harry heard through the phone, he noticed the sound of a door opening and closing.
"Indeed I could.", he agreed with Sarah and realized that she must be about as clueless as he was himself. After all, he knew he was not particularly clever or particularly well-informed, and could not hold a candle to the things the Doctor was capable of – even at his worst of times, hence Harry's following suggestion. "Last time I checked there was nothing out of the ordinary with them, but maybe our professional knows something. They could be otherworldly contraptions or portals into another dimension. What do you think, Sarah?" Harry knew well that the Doctor's messed up memory might fail him. However, their last joint investigation had brought their attention to the mirrors in the first place.

"You think the Doctor could figure out what's so strange about the mirrors?", the pretty woman echoed.

"Yes, I wonder!", the Doctor's loud and distinctive voice suddenly rang out. There was an unmistakably annoyed tone to it. "Hand me the phone for a moment, will you?" The phone line cracked for a moment as he took the receiver from Sarah's hand, seemingly without awaiting her consent. "Hello, Harry! I don't know what you're investigating this time, but I'm not keen on getting knocked over my head because of some stupid old mirror again.", announced the Doctor with a voice that was overly cheerful and clearly mocked the younger man's request.

"But, uh, Doctor..." stammered the UNIT member, yet he was not given the time to formulate his thoughts into an argument.

"Doctor nothing!", he was interrupted harshly, then the Doctor's tone of speaking softened again. "Listen, you're a pretty good investigator yourself, aren't you? And I'm absolutely certain I don't know any more about mirrors than you do. So be a good chap and help yourself this time, all right?"

Before Harry had another chance to protest, he suddenly hung up. Although the Lieutenant was aware of what had happened to to them on the weekend – and that the Doctor still thought it had been his fault – he had not expected him to be resentful still. They had already figured out how pointless it was to blame each other by the time they had made it to his place. Half an hour afterwards and each of them had sat quietly in an armchair in front of his fireplace while The Generation Game had been playing on TV.

Still dumbfounded by the rude end of the conversation, Harry looked at the telephone wondering what he should do next. Then, unexpectedly, it rang again. "Hello?", he answered.

"Harry?" It was Sarah who had called him back. After a short hesitation, she whispered to him. "Don't mind his mood. He's just grouchy because he's caught a cold on your trip."

"I say, that explains that then."

"You know, of course I'm willing to help out.", she offered. "I won't make it just now, though. Is it all right if I pass by, say… at three in the afternoon?"

"Of course it is. No need to rush." He smiled to himself. "Mirror don't have legs to run, eh, Sarah?"

There was a chuckling coming from the other end of the line, and, somewhere further in the background the noise of a man coughing. "Not yet anyway. I'll be seeing you later then!", Sarah said good-bye.

"Until then. And thank you." And after that, Harry hung up, too, then leaned back in his office chair, hands folded over his lab coat. It was long until the afternoon and although he greatly admired Sarah's keen eye and sense for finding clues, he had a few doubts whether she would be able to make something of it all. But, who knew for sure? Maybe the next clue was more obvious than he thought.

The medical officer was feeling a little uneasy with this case on his mind and the apparent lack of a lead. He didn't have to work on it if he didn't want to, he knew. The Brigadier was long back from Geneva and if Harry would only bring up a reason, he probably could have persuaded him to assign another task to him. But ever since the Surgeon Lieutenant had been involved he felt a certain responsibility to bring the case to a conclusion, even more so now that someone had been murdered.