Trick or Treat

2

Detective Sergeant Benji Speyer pulled into a space in front of a sweetshop in North Laine, Carter's Confectionary, down near the beaches. It was the very crack of dawn on October 30th, and he'd been called out at the tail end of an unpleasant night shift because there was a suspected homicide. If only they'd waited a bit longer until it had been called in he would have been able to go home and get his daughter ready for school, but he wasn't sure he'd make it back in time now. The car windscreen was soaking wet in a rainstorm that had picked up in the last few hours of the night, the bleak, grey sky rumbling with the remnants of thunder clouds. Speyer put on the handbrake and got out of the car, hunching his shoulders against the rain. He'd forgotten his umbrella again.

Two uniformed officers waited outside the shop, their vivid police car parked behind his; he approached the one on the left, PC Presley, and asked for any details about the scene that might have been left out of his dispatch.

"Victim's name is Dennis Carter," she explained, "We talked to the neighbours, they say they heard some noise late last night and saw the lights were on but didn't think anything of it."

"Really?"

"Apparently he often stays at work late and there's a lot of machinery on site. They make their own sweets in the back. Suppose they just thought he was going above and beyond."

"Any other witnesses?"

"Not yet."

"Did you get a time of death from Victor?" She shook her head. He glanced around at the street until spotting a CCTV camera attached to a lamppost across the street. "Is that a dummy camera?"

"Don't think so," answered the other PC, Wilson. "But it's not pointing at the shop."

"Once Victor gets a time of death, get the footage from that camera."

"But it's-"

"It's pointed at the street, that means if anyone drove past, they might be a fresh witness," he explained. Wilson was newly qualified and hadn't yet developed his abilities for deductive reasoning – unless he was better than Speyer thought, and the night shift was getting to him as well. "Just see if anyone drove past. They might have seen the murderer go in and out."

"Yes, sir." Speyer entered the shop, pretending he didn't hear Wilson make an unpleasant remark about him to Presley when they thought he couldn't hear them. He couldn't see anything of note in the front. Nothing broken, no sign of forced entry on the door, nothing out of the ordinary. He cut through into the back where Victor, the coroner, and a pair of CSIs were looking around with torches. The dead body of Dennis Carter was splayed out on the floor in the back room of his shop, between the large machines used to make hard-boiled sweets. Speyer made a habit of getting his daughter some of those sweets on her birthday, but it looked like he wouldn't be able to do that anymore.

He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans to remove the temptation to touch anything, "What can you tell me?"

"It's a weird one," said Victor, who'd been crouching next to the body. He stood up when Speyer came to talk to him, "He's been choked to death with icing sugar, cake icing."

"They don't sell cakes here," said Speyer, peering down at the body. His skin had gone a purplish colour and his mouth was overflowing with a gluttonous, pink substance; the icing.

"No, and we haven't been able to find any icing in this stock room. The murderer must have brought it with them."

"Definitely murder? Not a strange kind of suicide?"

"If it was, it must have been his ghost who disposed of the weapon," said Victor, "He's got marks on his wrists from being tied up with rope, but no rope, either."

"Any fingerprints?"

"A lot, but they're all the victim's or other members of staff we have on record," answered one of the CSIs, holding up a remote fingerprint scanner they used to identify prints on the fly at crime scenes. Speyer would have to interview them all to find a possible motive for killing their boss.

"It's not just murder," said Victor, "It's sadistic if you ask me. His oesophagus, lungs and mouth are packed full of icing. They kept going with this stuff long after he was dead."

"Someone must have quite the vendetta."

"Maybe it's one of your lot," said the second CSI, Donovan.

"Excuse me?"

"That's what they say in the mob, isn't it? 'Iced'? This bloke's definitely been iced." Speyer clenched his jaw, annoyed. Would they ever let that go? He was estranged with his entire immediate family, didn't have a thing to do with their business. He didn't even have a criminal record.

"Maybe if they're in the 1940s, they do," he muttered, "This won't be a mob hit."

"Wouldn't hurt to call around," quipped Donovan.

"Say that again," Speyer challenged him. Donovan was silent. "That's what I thought." Even if he did think it was the mob, and even if he wanted to ask them, he didn't have a way to contact a single one of his relatives and hadn't for nearly fifteen years. He'd cut them off when Katie had been born.

"Could be a rival cake shop?" suggested Victor, "Do they fight much for clientele, cakes and sweets?"

"I doubt it, they don't sell cakes and Carter doesn't sell sweets. Is there a way to tell what brand this is?"

"Only if it's a shop-bought mix, it'd probably be impossible if somebody made it from scratch, which isn't exactly hard. I'll do my best, but I wouldn't expect much. It's a very interesting murder weapon, I'll give them that," explained Victor; Speyer knew a lot of that already, Katie liked to bake with him – when he had the time. So an actual murder weapon was going to be quite hard to find. Speyer squinted around, wondering if maybe an incriminating bag of icing had been kicked underneath one of the machines.

"Why aren't the lights on?"

"The switch is behind that thing, and nobody wants to go near it," Victor pointed at a shadowy corner behind Speyer, who turned to see what he was talking about. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw it; it was some kind of elaborate costume. A six-foot-tall monster loomed in the darkness, and he had to guess that it was an animatronic that Carter had used, or had been thinking of using, for advertising. It looked to be modelled from various sweets; a bloated belly like an enormous piece of liquorice, a shining chest like a hard-boiled sweet, two huge, floppy feet made of marshmallows, and a head like one of the blue Liquorice Allsorts.

"This thing looks like Bertie Bassett," said Speyer, "Do they sell much liquorice here?"

"I think they make it on-site," said Victor.

"It must be a robot or something," he said, "A weird mascot." It unnerved him a great deal to be around, and he, too, found himself deciding that he'd rather not reach for the light switch, content to look around the room with torches. But then he spotted something else, something that probably wouldn't have gone amiss if the lights were on. "Hang on…" he took his torch out of his jacket pocket and switched it on, illuminating a series of marks on the wall.

But they weren't just marks, they were letters, spelling out a word written enormously across the whole back wall of the sweetshop backroom in the same white icing bursting from Dennis Carter's mouth. Written up there for all to see in bold, capital letters, was one, lonely word: 'DOCTOR'.

Rain lashed the windows of the library at Turing High School, cacophonous enough that it was preventing them from getting their science homework done over lunch. Food and stationary stretched across the table – they didn't have an awful lot of time to spare before the afternoon lessons – but lo and behold, Steph was still finding ways to be a nightmare. Only now she wasn't only disrupting what Matilda and Aki were trying to do, but she was also sneaking away to a nearby table every so often to bother Hannah Beckett and her friends, the four of whom were also trying to do their science presentation for Mr McCloud, which was due to see the light of day tomorrow. Steph was a harder obstacle to overcome than the persistent thunder outside.

"No, look, seriously," Steph began on the same topic of conversation she'd been harping on about all day, "I think I'm being haunted. I think there's a demon after me. I mean, look at the weather."

"Steph, we're in England," said Mattie, "It rains. It's not because you tried to summon a demon with some pieces of paper and my washing up bowl."

"You literally can't prove that."

"Do you actually even believe in demons? If there's no hell in Judaism, how can there be demons?"

"They're forces put into the world by God for his own ends," she said, "And besides, there's evidence, like the rain."

"I'm not talking about this anymore. I'm reading about black holes, go away. Go tell Hannah about your demons."

"Fine," Steph snapped, getting up and ditching them for Hannah once again. Mattie rolled her eyes. Hannah's friends were just as annoyed as Mattie and Aki were at the interruptions, but Mattie tried to put it out of her mind and focused on a passage in a very old textbook about the visible light spectrum. Aki was also taking notes but cursed suddenly, stopping through to get something out of her bag. It was a packet of tablets. The box was pink, the foil was pink, and when she popped out one of the pills that, too, was bright pink.

"What are those?" Mattie asked.

"Oestrogen tablets."

"Why are they so pink?"

"They're for feminising hormone therapy."

"Yeah, but… they're so pink," said Mattie, staring.

"I forgot to take it this morning," Aki explained, "It's just nice that they're pink, I guess."

"Isn't it kind of patronising? Are the testosterone ones blue?"

"I don't know, I've never seen them. I don't know any trans boys to ask."

"Are there none in our year? You've been here longer than me."

"There isn't like, a group chat, or a big club, where all the LGBT people hang out with each other."

"Are you sure?" Mattie asked, glimpsing Steph pull Hannah out of her seat by the elbow, "Looks like Steph and Hannah might be making one right now over in those bookshelves."

"Urgh… that's just… think of the books…" said Aki.

"Maybe we can get this finished before she comes back, if we hurry." But as the two queer girls who had been in the room disappeared into the stacks together, they were quickly replaced by two more – the only difference was that these ones were grown adults.

Mattie was a little bit mortified when Clara and the Doctor came into the library together, carrying their packed lunches between them. She, too, had a packed lunch in front of her made by the Doctor that morning, because when the Doctor made lunch for Clara – which happened on days when the weather was bad enough to stop them going out to a café – she now made one for Matilda, as well. Though, she refused to make Nutella sandwiches, because they weren't 'nutritional', or something (it had been a BLT that day.)

"Are we allowed to sit with you, or is that not okay?" Clara asked. She was embarrassing her already.

"We're trying to avoid the staffroom. There are… arguments," said the Doctor cryptically.

"Between who? About what?"

"Just…"

"Miss Pickman and Mr Chapel aren't very happy with each other," said Clara, "And that's all we have to say on the matter, but they're being very annoying… promise we won't disturb you while you do your science homework."

"Ooh, are you reading about redshift?" the Doctor spotted what was on the page of the textbook Aki was reading, pulling out the empty chair on her left to sit down, "Redshift is right at the top of my list of favourite astronomical phenomena. Is this what your presentation is on?"

"…Yeah, but it's sort of confusing," said Aki.

"It's easy once you get the hang of it – it's just about understanding wavelength patterns," the Doctor explained, "Should've said something about your topic, I could've helped."

"Don't do it for them," said Clara, sitting down and taking out her sandwich. Mattie wasn't too thrilled about that, because Clara almost exclusively ate egg sandwiches, and even if they didn't have eggs themselves, they were always full of mayonnaise, more mayonnaise than any human should be consuming in one sitting. This meant that it stank to be in the same room.

"See, it's because the cones in human eyes are designed to receive different wavelengths because wavelength correlates to colour. Red has the longest wavelength, so as objects in outer space move further away, the wavelength gets longer, and they look redder and redder. I thought your project is about black holes?"

"Um… it is, but… aren't you a history teacher?"

"I do a bit of everything."

"Do you know what a singularity is?"

"Do I? Don't jump into a singularity for at least an hour after eating, that's what I always say." She paused. "Or is that swimming?" Clara kicked her underneath the table. "I mean, yes, I do know; it's the point of infinite density in the heart of a black hole…"

Clara zoned out as the Doctor began this next explanation. She'd listened to her explain cosmic phenomenon every day for decades and wasn't interested in hearing it at the moment. It didn't take long for the Doctor to get onto quasars and all sorts of nonsense Clara couldn't care less about. Aki was hastily scribbling notes to keep up with what the Doctor was telling her.

But soon enough Clara was being called upon for information, summoned by Alice, Hannah's closest friend who absolutely hated Stefani. And come to think of it, she didn't see either Steph or Hannah, though she saw their bags and empty chairs. Regardless, she took her sandwich to the next table over, leaving the Doctor to talk endlessly about the physics she wished she was teaching, and pulled out a chair with a different set of girls.

"What's up?" she asked.

"I don't understand this play," said Alice, holding a book out to her, "They're all acting like it's a happy ending, but Demetrius never wanted to be with Helena, and he's still being tricked by the magic flower."

"Oh. Yeah, it is a bit… dodge," said Clara.

"But that's the end."

"Yeah, well, it was a few hundred years ago. And Demetrius is a bit of a prick, really, isn't he? Why won't he just leave Lysander and Hermia alone at the beginning?" said Clara, "He's sleazy. Besides, Shakespeare predicted this sort of reaction, see." She put down her sandwich and took the play from Alice, flipping to the very last page and pointing out a passage, "Do you see, Puck's closing soliloquy to the audience: 'If we shadows have offended, think but this and all is mended; That you have but slumbered here, while these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream.'"

"So it is a dream? Are the fairies not real?"

"It's all up for interpretation," said Clara, "But you have to imagine being there, watching it, and having Puck come out and say all this. Shakespeare is talking through Puck; it's authorial intervention to say, 'hey, don't be offended because this is all made up.'"

"But it's still creepy," Alice persisted.

"You're at perfect liberty to think it's creepy, why don't you write your coursework on consent in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or something? It's totally fine to think that Shakespeare is a massive scumbag, you just have to have some textual evidence and reasoning to back yourself up."

"What do you think about Shakespeare?"

"Bit of a cad. Wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him."

"So you don't like this play?"

"Oh, it's one of my favourites. Not that you're wrong about it – you're completely right about Demetrius still being under the effects of Love in Idleness by the end. The existence of Love in Idleness as the core plot device brings quite a lot into question where consent is concerned."

"Hannah wanted to ask you something about Lysander," said Alice.

"Oh… okay? Where is she?" Clara glanced around.

"She's off with Steph, in the bookshelves somewhere."

"In the-? Did you hear that?" she leant back in her seat to get the Doctor's attention. The Doctor was mid-sentence but broke off immediately when Clara spoke to her.

"Hear what?"

"Steph and Hannah have snuck off into the shelves."

"Yeah, they went just before you came in," said Mattie, "Gives us a chance to get this work done…"

"…Do we need to do something about that?" asked the Doctor, "Like, stop them? This is a school. Wouldn't it be like… exhibitionism?"

"Stop talking," said Clara.

There was a crash and a shriek from among the shelves. A whole row of books came falling to the floor as if pushed, and it didn't take long for Steph and Hannah to reappear, having been attacked by the furniture. They hadn't been able to get into too much trouble by the looks of things, but Steph was especially traumatised about something or other and came to bother Matilda as soon as possible.

"You see!?" she hissed, "Demons."

"You probably just knocked the books over yourself because you were getting too handsy," said Matilda, not impressed.

"We were not. This is a library, it has rules. I respect libraries."

"But do you respect yourself?"

Steph grew very huffy after that and sat back down. Hannah had returned to her original seat looking thoroughly embarrassed.

"Are you going to clean up those books, Stefani, or wait until Mrs Henderson has to come over and do it? With her back?" Clara challenged, bringing up the librarian, who was a favourite of the kids and nearing retirement.

"I didn't knock them off!" Steph protested. Clara looked at her sternly. "You know what?" Steph began, standing up, "I won't put up with this sort of thing." Then she went to put the books back anyway, albeit making a lot of disgruntled noises.

Clara watched her go then rolled her eyes, before turning back to Hannah, "I heard you have some questions about Lysander?"

"…Not about Lysander, I was reading something about, like him using rhyming couplets, and I didn't really get it, because all the characters speak in rhyme," said Hannah. Clara was impressed by her reading around the subject.

"Okay, well, I don't know that you'd have to note this in your coursework, but I'll show you something," she flipped back through Alice's copy of Midsummer to find a certain passage, "Alright, the interesting device is shared couplets, which Lysander is using to seduce Helena here."

"But if they all speak in rhyme already-" Hannah began.

"I'll explain, look; Helena thinks he might be dead, so she says, 'Lysander if you live, good sir awake,' then he says-"

"And run through fire I will for thy sweet sake," said the Doctor a little loudly, overhearing. Clara looked up to see the Doctor smiling at her and couldn't help but smile back for a second before realising it was a touch unprofessional, clearing her throat and getting back to what she'd been doing.

"Uh, yes, that's what he says," she said, hoping she wasn't blushing. The Doctor leant over the back of her chair.

"They do all speak in rhyme," she said, "But we're all speaking in, y'know, sentences. Prose. Even if you don't rhyme, there's still something intimate about finishing someone else's sentences. That's what Shakespeare is showing by having Lysander finish Helena's couplet."

"But Helena doesn't like Lysander," said Hannah.

"Right, that's why it's only Lysander who finishes her couplets at this point, to show it isn't reciprocated," said Clara, then to the Doctor, "Go back to your space stuff, leave me alone."

"Fine, fine… what was I talking about? Oh, yeah – Schwarzschild radii… wait, one more thing," she caught Clara's attention again, "Mattie's coming with us to get pumpkins straight after school, right?"

Clara sighed and asked Matilda – because the Doctor apparently couldn't do it, "Are you coming with us to get pumpkins straight after school?"

"Yeah, fine, whatever…" she mumbled, never a fan of them acknowledging that she lived with them while she was around her peers.

"Awesome!" the Doctor smiled, "I'm gonna buy every single pumpkin they've got."

"Mm, I don't think you are," said Clara.

"I'm gonna buy at least one pumpkin. But it's gonna be the best pumpkin this planet has ever seen, mark my words. As soon as I think of a good name for it."

"You can call it Squash," said Clara.

"Yes! We are so on the same page today, Oswald. Squash it is, and I can't wait to meet him…"

"He did the mash, he did the monster mash; the monster mash, it was a graveyard smash; he did the mash, it caught on in a flash; he did the mash, he did the-"

"Okay, do we have to listen to this while I try to drive?" Clara said loudly, cutting across the Doctor's singing along to an ancient CD of Halloween party songs she'd found somewhere. As usual, the Doctor was sandwiched in the middle of the van's front seat, with Mattie leaning on the door also looking thoroughly displeased with the Halloween medley they were being subjected to.

"Do you want me to put This is Halloween on again?"

"You're gonna pay for this. It's going to be Mariah Carey every single day in December."

"Is it too late for me to go and live on Rose's TARDIS?" asked Mattie.

"You'll be getting kicked out if you disrespect Mariah like that again," said Clara. Mattie ignored her. The Doctor started singing along to Monster Mash again as they drove out of Brighton, heading towards a farm just outside of the city where they could get some good quality pumpkins the day before Halloween.

"Why did you come to the library at lunch?" Matilda asked after getting tired of listening to the Doctor.

"Are you upset about that?" asked Clara.

"About that? No, I was just…" but she did seem a little melancholy.

"Sarah and Kyle were being very obnoxious," said the Doctor, "It turned into a shouting match eventually. Something to do with Pizza Hut, I don't know. Hard to follow."

"I don't think Pizza Hut was the issue," said Clara.

"Look, all I know is they were yelling about dough balls and it was all very intense, and then she broke a mug. I wasn't sure we'd get out of there alive."

"Don't tell your friends," Clara added, "My office has a leak in the window that needs to be fixed, not very nice in the storm." It was still raining, albeit gentler than it had been for most of the day.

"I won't tell them about Pickman and Chapel. But you have to tell me what happened last night."

"What do you mean?" asked Clara carefully.

"When Hannah's dad showed up and then you were being weird." Clara didn't say anything, contemplating this and trying to watch the road in the poor weather.

"C'mon, Coo," said the Doctor, "If you told Steph, you can tell Matts."

"Well, it concerned Steph," said Clara.

"What does? What was it?" Mattie asked, "Steph didn't say anything."

"Good. Look, it's not important, I don't want you to worry about it," said Clara, spotting the sign for the turn-off to the farm, "He just wanted to talk to me about Steph and Hannah. He wants me to encourage them to break up."

"What? What did you tell him?"

"That it's not my place or job to get involved with their personal lives, obviously," she said, "I'm not going to do it. I just told Steph because I thought she should know." Like with Steph, Clara also left out the part about him threatening her job. She turned off onto a muddy dirt road and headed towards the farm, the carpark already quite full of people there to get last-minute pumpkins. The Doctor liked it there especially because it was owned and operated by American immigrants, and she liked to pretend she was one of them.

It didn't take long for Clara to find somewhere to park, the Doctor on the brink of exploding from the sheer excitement of buying a pumpkin. It took all her energy not to climb over Clara in her hurry to get out of the car, jumping down into the mud and putting up her umbrella – the one she'd reclaimed from Osgood's mansion, which she said belonged to her Seventh incarnation – going off and leaving Clara and Matilda to fend for themselves in the rain. It was a lucky thing Matilda had an umbrella of her own. Clara locked the van and left her wife to go pilfer the pumpkin fields for all they were worth. There were still quite a lot of vegetables left.

"Are you okay? You've been a bit glum today," Clara asked her, shuffling along underneath Mattie's umbrella. She could stop the rain with telekinesis but had to keep a low profile. Nobody could find out she was a Manifest.

"Yeah, no, I'm… fine," she said very unconvincingly, watching the Doctor jump over a low wooden fence to get into the pumpkin fields to start examining the vegetables. Clara also watched her fondly for a few seconds but was more concerned with Matilda.

"You sure? If you want to go home, we can go back now, and I'll bring her here on her own later."

"No, you don't have to do that," said Mattie quickly.

"I don't mind the drive. And it's still early, it's only four."

"I just… you'll laugh at me."

Clara frowned, "I won't laugh at you, especially not if something's the matter. Promise." The Doctor wasn't paying them any notice, and Clara didn't have enough of opinion on pumpkins to care about what she was up to, instead patiently waiting for Mattie to answer. She took the umbrella to hold in the meantime, needing to occupy her hands as another cigarette craving came over her.

"I… it…" she rubbed her lazy eye, which she was prone to do whenever she was agitated.

"Don't do that, you'll make it worse," said Clara.

"…Me and dad used to carve pumpkins every year for Halloween. It feels weird to do it when he's not here."

"You don't have to if you don't want," said Clara, "I get it. You don't have to do it without him." It had only been three months.

"But the Doctor-"

"Don't worry about her, she's just excitable. She'll understand. Are you sure you don't want to go wait at home?"

"It's… fine."

"If you want to leave, just let me know, yeah? I understand," Clara began to walk towards the pumpkin fields to re-join the Doctor, "My mum, see, taught me how to play the piano. Did I tell you that?"

"I don't think so."

"She was going to be a concert pianist when she was young, but she broke her wrist and couldn't play well enough. She taught me as soon as I was old enough to understand what I was doing; I think I was six. It was like, our thing, that we always did together. Like carving a pumpkin every Halloween. And when she died… I never tell anyone I can play the piano anymore. The Doctor didn't find out for months. And I almost never play in front of anybody, even her. Feels like it's something… private. But you know something else?"

"What? This is a pretty sad story."

"I taught Oswin how to play. And that was cathartic, it made me feel better. Even though I still don't play for people." She paused for a while, standing a few feet away from the Doctor in the muddy rows of vegetables; she was crouching down and peering at the pumpkins in turn. She added to Mattie, "Things will… get easier. It's normal for them not to be easy right now."

"This bad boy looks pretty hot, don't you think?" the Doctor pointed out a pumpkin, shattering the mood and the sentiment behind Clara's story.

"Just choose whichever ones you like, sweetheart," Clara told her with a sigh, "We're getting three."

"I thought we were getting four?"

"Mattie doesn't want to carve one, so it's just three."

"But I wanted to stack them outside, in a trio."

"We'll put them either side of the door outside, okay?" said Clara, trying to placate her. The extra one was for the pumpkin pie she was going to bake that evening. The Doctor saw Clara's expression and knew not to press the matter of additional pumpkins any further.

"In that case, we're getting the biggest ones I can find."

"Okay, sweetheart," said Clara, then she added as an aside to Matilda, "She could buy her own pumpkins if she didn't refuse to get a phone or a bank account…"

"I heard that," said the Doctor, "And it's about money. I disagree with it, as a concept."

"How can you disagree with money?" Mattie asked.

"Come over here to help me look for rotten bits and I'll tell you all about it," the Doctor offered, which wasn't quite an invitation and more of an instruction. Regardless, Mattie was intrigued enough to talk to the Doctor about politics and Clara decided to let them be. As long as Mattie was alright she didn't mind and began examining the pumpkins herself.

Carrying Mattie's umbrella still, she stepped over a row to go further up the field because she thought she saw an especially large one, but then spotted something else that made her pause. One of the pumpkins, vividly orange, had a red mark on it. Intrigued, she stooped down as well as she could in the mud to get a look at it but couldn't quite work out what it was. The rain was steadily washing it away though, so it couldn't have been there for very long at all… Clara took a gamble and touched it with her finger; it came right off, staining her skin, but it couldn't be…?

She glanced around at the surrounding pumpkins and saw some more red blots, all also getting progressively fainter in the rain. The Doctor and Mattie still engaged in this or that, Clara decided to follow the red, going further and further up the field as the pumpkins got a higher and higher volume of stain. It was a trail, and it was leading somewhere: a crooked, lonely scarecrow, darkened from the rainstorm, was suspended from a wooden post at the top of the pumpkin patch. In typical fashion, this scarecrow had a pumpkin for a head – what else did she expect? – but it was surrounded by red on all sides. It looked to be oozing the fluid.

It was a little way off the ground, suspended higher than Clara could see properly. She drew as close to it as she could, her shoes caked in mud, holding the umbrella carefully as she stood on tiptoes to peer at it properly. Through the carved eye socket of the pumpkin, Clara's worst fears were confirmed. She found a milky eye looking back at her through the orange face. It was a dead body, killed very recently, and strung up in the pumpkin patch like an ornament. If she wasn't so desensitised to violence, she'd be horrified. She backed away slowly, not wanting to contaminate the crime scene any further, retreating towards the Doctor and Matilda.

"I need a word," she said, taking the Doctor's hand, "Matts, can you stay right here?" Clara told her seriously.

"Uh…" She returned Matilda's umbrella.

"Don't move from here. We'll be back in a second, okay? We're just going over here," Clara began to drag the Doctor to the side.

"What's going on, Coo? Are you alright?"

"Listen, listen," Clara lowered her voice, "Be discreet, okay?"

"Okay?"

"Do you see that scarecrow over there?"

"Yeah, what about it?"

"It's a body."

"Excuse me?"

"A dead body. There's blood on the pumpkins around it," said Clara.

"What? You're…?" the Doctor turned to look at it.

"Yes."

"It could be a stunt, Clara. It's Halloween, after all."

"No, it's not. Go wait with Mattie, I'm going to call the police, then we'll go tell the owners and stay at the van. We'll have to stay to talk to them."

"We'll what? We never talk to the police."

"Yeah, well, we have to, because we live here now, and we can't go around investigating murders on our own."

"You think it was murder?"

"Well I don't see how they made themselves into a scarecrow…" she said, taking her phone out. "Go make sure Mattie stays away from it, I'm not having her subjected to another dead body."

"I think it's a little late for that after we took her to meet Madame Tussaud… but sure. You talk to the feds; I'll be just over here."

Speyer had clocked out at eight that morning and was forced to drag himself out of bed after his nightshift to get back out by four, as another call about a strange murder came in. He always got the strange ones, the ones that often went unsolved. No forensics had come back from the Dennis Carter case that morning, and the CCTV cameras on the street had been smashed just around Victor's estimated time of death. If the MO wasn't so bizarre, he'd say it looked professional. But as odd as killing someone with asphyxiation via icing sugar was, this new incident where someone had been strung up like a scarecrow in the middle of a pumpkin patch, full of families coming to pick their vegetables for Halloween, was even odder.

Presley, once again, was the constable on the scene and the first Speyer met after finally getting to the rainy farm, a little out of the way of Brighton & Hove. It was almost out of their jurisdiction.

"Do we have an ID?" he asked her.

"Not yet, Sarge, we're working on it."

"She's young, might not even be eighteen yet," Victor, examining the body, said. The pumpkin that had been stuck on the victim's head had been removed and set to the side, a tent already set up on the premises to protect it from the rainfall and prying eyes. As usual, Speyer stuck his hands in his pockets.

"How did she die?"

"It's a nasty one," said Victor, "She's been gutted. Almost clean in half."

"What's the murder weapon?"

"From my preliminaries, I'd guess a scythe. Maybe a sickle, but the wound is too huge. I can let you know for sure once I've done the autopsy," he said.

"A scythe? And a scarecrow? The day before Halloween?"

"You think we have a Halloween-themed murder on our hands?" Presley asked him.

"Whoever did it went to the trouble of carving the pumpkin to put on her head. Are there any witnesses?"

"None, except for the woman who found the body," said Presley, "She says it was already strung up when she got here, and that she saw blood on the pumpkins."

"Very small window… is she still here?"

"Waiting by a bright blue, VW camper van. You probably saw it when you parked." He had seen it. He thought it was a ridiculous vehicle.

"Anything else?"

"Yes, this," said Victor, picking something up from the floor that had a plastic letter next to it. It was a large bar of chocolate, but while it looked factory-manufactured, with foil and paper wrapping, it didn't have a brand, a bar-code, any ingredients, or anything at all printed on it. Except for one word, written out in what appeared to be the victim's blood: 'ACE.'

"Ace? What does that mean? Is that her name, is it the killer's name? Is it a brand? Does it stand for something?"

"Your guess is as good as mine," said Victor, "But it's homemade, the chocolate. Like the icing this morning."

"…You don't think they're related?" he asked.

"I really don't know. I just do the post-mortems."

"Alright… our priorities are canvassing for potential witnesses and identifying the girl. I'm going to go talk to the woman who found the body and see if the owners have any scythes lying around."

Speyer ditched the tent to walk through the rain and get back to the carpark. People were getting turned away at the road to the farm by officers, while the people present when the body was found were being kept for questioning. The Volkswagen certainly stood out, and a woman got out to greet him as he approached. The passenger side window, behind her, was rolled down and a second woman leant out to listen in. Speyer took out his ID.

"DS Speyer; are you the one who found the body?" he asked, putting away the ID after a second and taking out his phone to write his notes on.

"Yes, I am," she said.

"Name?" he prompted.

"Clara, Clara Oswald." He thought he recognised that name from somewhere.

"Do you know what time you got here?"

"Ten to four, or thereabouts," she said, "We came straight after work."

"Where do you work?"

"Turing High School. I'm a teacher. This is my wife eavesdropping," Clara introduced the woman leaning out of the window.

"Hi," she said, looking at him suspiciously, "Did you say your name is Speyer?" She was American. He clenched his jaw.

"Yes, that's right. Detective Sergeant Benji Speyer." She must know his family history.

"Any relation to the war hero, Archie Speyer?"

"To the-? War hero?"

"Sailor who defused a sea mine single-handedly in 1944." Normally what he got was 'Archie Speyer, the mobster, whose family had stayed in organised crime for generations.'

"Um… he was my great-grandfather."

"And you're a cop in Brighton?" asked the American, "Isn't that like if Michael Corleone joined the FBI?"

"Why do you know so much about it?"

"I'm a history teacher," she said, "I've researched Brighton quite a lot."

"Yeah, okay. I'm not dirty, alright?"

"Wouldn't hold it against it if you were," she said. He didn't quite know what that meant.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"I'm the Doctor," she said. He made a start – that was the word written on the wall of the crime scene that morning. And now she was here at this one?

"Doctor who?" he asked.

"Theodora," Clara interrupted, answering for her like she didn't know what her own name was, "Dr Theodora Oswald."

"Eurgh," she made a face, "Just hearing it out loud makes me cringe. It's 'the Doctor,' if you don't mind. Everybody calls me that."

"So it's a nickname? How long have you had it?"

"As long as I can remember."

"Before you had a doctorate?"

She laughed, "A long time before."

"Can you account for your whereabouts between nine and ten o'clock last night?" he asked her.

"Excuse me?" she was alarmed.

"Where were you yesterday between nine and ten PM."

"I was at home."

"Can anyone corroborate that?"

"Sorry, you're asking me for an alibi? For what crime?"

"Please answer the question, ma'am."

"I was with her," a third person interrupted. Speyer hadn't seen the teenager girl in their van.

"Who's this?" he asked, suspicious.

"This is Mattie – Matilda. Smith-Jones. We're her legal guardians, she lives with us," said Clara stiffly, "She had friends over from school yesterday until just after nine, then I drove them both home and came straight back."

"So you were out driving between nine and ten? Where, exactly?" She was obviously annoyed at being asked these questions. "And what are these friends called?"

"Oh, for… Akiko Inoue and Stefani Kaczmarek. They were doing a science project."

"Inoue as in the Inoue Noodle Bar?"

"Yes."

"In North Laine?"

"Yes. I made sure she got in, her dad saw me out there and knows me from school, and then I drove Stefani back to her flat in Hanover and came home. I was barely out for half an hour."

"Have you ever been to Carter's Confectionary? It's a few doors down from the Inoue Noodle Bar."

"I… yes. A few times before."

"Are you aware that the owner of Carter's Confectionary was murdered last night, between nine and ten?"

"What? No, I… but…" she had a strange reaction.

"Do you have something to tell me?"

"Well, the lights were on. I remember seeing. I pointed it out to Steph." On the face of it, Speyer didn't think either Mrs or Dr Oswald was behind the crimes, but he couldn't shake the feeling that they were somehow connected. He'd investigate their alibis, but they had quite a few witnesses for their whereabouts. "What happened? How did he die?"

"He was asphyxiated, with icing sugar."

"Icing sugar?" she asked.

"And the word 'DOCTOR' was written on the wall of the crime scene in the very same icing sugar." He scrutinised their reactions carefully but couldn't quite read them.

"There are a lot of doctors in the world," said Clara.

"And how many of them have a connection to both of these unusual crime scenes?"

"We both have alibis," said the Doctor firmly.

"Can I have a look in the back of this van?"

"Do you have a warrant?" the Doctor asked.

"It's fine, sweetheart," said Clara, shaking her head and going to open up the side door. He wouldn't have been happy if they made him go and get a warrant to look inside. He was looking for the murder weapon, the scythe Victor said had been used to kill the girl. There was some camping equipment, spare clothes and shoes, but nothing initially of note. He didn't think they'd done it. He could easily check with the school whether they'd been in until the end of the day, and there wasn't time between then and now to carry out such an elaborate murder. Maybe they were the targets?

"One more question," he said as Clara closed the van, "Does the word 'ACE' mean anything to you? Could be initials, could be a name?"

"Nothing," said the Doctor firmly, "Why?" Speyer narrowed his eyes at her.

"The scarecrow had an unbranded, home-made bar of chocolate found on her body. It has 'ACE' written on it in what we're assuming is her own blood."

"Sorry, officer. It doesn't mean anything to us." Speyer looked at Clara to prompt her to answer.

"I have no idea what it means. Sorry."

"Did you see anybody suspicious around Carter's Confectionary while you were there last night? Apart from the lights being on."

"Nothing. I didn't know I should have been looking. Otherwise, I would have called the police like I did today when I found that body in the field." He supposed she had a point. "Are we free to leave yet?"

"Can I get an address and a phone number? In case of any follow-up questions. We'll need to call you into the station to make an official statement regarding last night's incident and your discovery of the body." Clara sighed, irritated, but rattled off their address and her mobile number as quickly as she could. "If you head down there as soon as possible, within the next week ideally."

"Yes, sure…"

Speyer stepped back from the van, "Drive safe. Let me know if you stumble across any more murders."

"Ha, ha… I'll try not to…" she grumbled, walking around to the right-hand door on the other side to get back in.

Clara was grateful he hadn't ordered her to present herself to the police station that very evening. She almost wished they didn't live permanently in 2064, or she could've gotten away with not dealing with the bureaucracy of the criminal justice system. They couldn't very well find a body and then sneak off without telling anyone about it.

There was silence in the van as she drove.

"…Do you want to go to the supermarket to get some cheap pumpkins?" Clara asked eventually. Mattie was now relegated to the middle, with the Doctor by the passenger door. The Doctor didn't answer. "Doctor?"

"Huh?" she looked over. She was deep in thought about something.

"…What's going on?" asked Clara seriously.

"I do recognise the name."

"What name?"

"Ace... I think these murders are messages. Messages for me."

"What?"

"And I think I know who the culprit is, too…"