Crow Boy by Philip Caveney Page B

nothing to do. Because of the white sheet in the window, no customers came to bring laundry and the tenants on the upper floors didn’t want to have anything to do with the people living below them – not until the all-clear was given.
    Missie Grierson spent much of her time in Alison’s room and the children, free from the everyday toil of their trade, moped around the first and second floors like three lost lambs. Tom found himself sitting with Morag in the kitchen. In fact, since his run-in with The Doctor, he couldn’t seem to go anywhere without her trailing along after him, looking up at him in some kind of bewildered awe. Clearly she had been very impressed by the way he’d handled himself. He’d sneaked off to the kitchen to try to think about what was happening and what he might do to escape from here but Morag had still found her way to him. He hadn’t the heart to tell her to clear off. She was clearly worried and wanting reassurance.
    â€˜Do you think Alison’s going to be all right?’ she asked him fearfully for perhaps the sixth time that day.
    He nodded. ‘Missie Grierson says she’s loads better. She reckons it’s her chicken broth that’s done the trick, but I know it’s the antibiotics . . .’ He glanced at her. ‘The, er . . . Sassenach pills,’ he corrected himself.
    â€˜You saved her life,’ said Morag, almost as though she thought he might not have realised this. ‘She’ll always be in your debt.’
    Tom shrugged. ‘She doesn’t owe me anything,’ he said. ‘It was just lucky I had the pills with me. See, I had this ear infection a while ago but it went away by itself. I’d kind of forgotten I had them.’
    â€˜Well it’s lucky you did. What’s an ear infection?’
    â€˜Oh it’s just . . . you know, when you get earache.’
    â€˜Like when you’ve been listening to Cameron?’ said Morag brightly and Tom grinned.
    â€˜Yeah, that would do it,’ he agreed.
    Morag studied him intently. ‘Cameron says you’re a bampot,’ she said.
    â€˜Yeah, I know he does.’
    â€˜He says that you keep going on about being from the future.’
    â€˜Only because it’s true,’ insisted Tom.
    â€˜But . . . how could you be?’
    â€˜I don’t really understand it myself.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Remember when I first met you on the Royal Mile? And I said I’d had a fall?’
    She nodded.
    â€˜Well, that’s what happened to me – only when I began to fall I was in 2012 . . . and when I landed I was here, in 1645. It’s like I just . . . fell through time.’ He frowned. ‘I told Cameron all this but he didn’t believe me.’
    â€˜I believe you,’ said Morag, solemnly.
    Tom smiled at her. He reached into his pocket and took out his mobile phone. ‘See, I showed him this,’ he said, ‘I thought it might convince him if I could make it work, but of course I couldn’t get a . . .’ He broke off in surprise as he saw that the phone’s icon was now illuminated. It was only weak: a couple of bars, but it was a signal.
    He didn’t waste any time wondering how such a thing could be possible. He pressed his contacts button and hit his dad’s mobile number, noting as he did so that the battery level was already dangerously low. He lifted the device to his ear and listened intently. There was the longest pause and then a ringing tone. It sounded very far away and, Tom thought, it ought to . It was travelling hundreds of miles across hundreds of years. He waited, hardly daring to breathe.
    â€˜What are you doing?’ asked Morag, mystified.
    â€˜I’m phoning my dad.’
    â€˜But what . . .?’
    He waved her to silence. The phone rang again and again and he began to think he was wasting his time. Then–
    â€˜Hello?’ His dad’s voice: faint,