Heart of Tardis Read online

  Even looking for something as basic as misappropriation of funds had been a dead end. The paymaster’s files showed a number of entries for special duties compensation and for deaths in the line of duty, but there was no mention of what those duties were or what the deaths were from. The only real anomalies Delbane had found were references to a certain Dr John Smith, a so-called ‘scientific adviser’ with a hideously erratic and exorbitant rate of pay and a file attachment to the effect that he had been ‘deactivated’.

  The lead was so thin as to be laughable but Delbane was nothing if not thorough, which was why she was currently in the workroom once used by Dr Smith. They were in disarray, as though their occupant had merely stepped out for a second and might return at any moment, but covered with a film of dust -

  the gritty and particulate dust of London grime rather than the shed skin cells that would suggest visits by other human beings since Dr Smith had gone. Delbane was reminded of the untouched, shrine-like way in which some of the people in Belfast (her first and only real direct experience with such things) kept the rooms of loved ones who had been roughly deleted from their lives.

  With the uneasy sense of defiling such a shrine, Delbane wandered between benches crammed with complicatedly breadboarded electronics that her trained eye saw could never work and strange arrays of twisted glass tubing that reminded her of every mad scientist’s laboratory in old movies and could probably fractionate a reasonable moonshine. Even stranger devices appeared to be nothing more than the sculpture installations of a deranged artist, cobbled together from any number of mismatched materials, the intended function of which - if there had ever been one - she could not even begin to imagine.

  Here and there were scribbled notes, written on an eclectic collection of yellowing chit forms, torn newspaper squares and bus tickets in anything from fountain-pen ink to crayon and what appeared to be nail varnish - this last, over an old and cheesy newsprint portrait of a smiling, hourglass-figured Diana Dors, used for a set of perfectly calligraphed ideograms that she recognised as Japanese.

  Standing out from the clutter, in the sense that it did the precise reverse, was a gap where a large document cabinet or the like had been removed from its place against a wall. There was something odd about this, and it took Delbane a second before she realised why: the cabinet had been removed in some manner that had left absolutely nothing else disturbed.

  Something caught her eye on the floor where the putative cabinet had been and she picked it up. It was a garish comic book from the 1960s, creased and flattened, that had obviously been dropped then mashed down by the weight of the cabinet and subsequently forgotten about. Without much interest, Delbane flipped through pages of International Retrieval, Joey Mindswap, Goron killer robot-units surfacing from the Thames and exploded diagrams of second-stage Saturn probes.

  There was one particularly opaque strip that had something to do with an ineptly delineated farmer in an incongruous porkpie hat and gabardine macintosh running away from walking scarecrows that were turning into irascible-looking old men in flowing robes.

  The comic had obviously been dropped by some semi-literate public works contractor or private soldier years before. All the same she put it in the zip-locked PVC folder she carried, along with her collection of Smith’s notes.

  The doors of the hut that contained the workroom were of heavy steel plate, and looked as though they could withstand the force of a small nuclear blast - if not the hordes of ragged and bloodthirsty mutants that would subsequently appear, if you could believe in garish comic books. The doors had no locks and the hasps that might have accommodated padlocks had been painted open with layers of thick and liquid-looking military green paint.

  Delbane pushed the doors shut behind her with a clank and headed along the gravel pathway towards her proper place of duty. Her route took her around the back of the kitchens so it was a small while before she reached one of the more well-travelled areas. When she did she realised that something was wrong.

  Soldiers’ bodies lay here and there, dragged and dumped in an effort to conceal them not from those within the barracks but from any casual observer outside them. They lay against walls and by doors and against the ductwork that protruded from the huts looking like a collection of rag dolls scattered in a tantrum by a child who’d received yet another rag doll for Christmas. Delbane stopped dead, her startled eyes darting from one body to another.

  There was a blur of motion from behind her, from the direction of the big Calor Gas canisters outside the kitchens, and something hit her hard, to bear her down into the gravel.

  Chapter Seven

  Strangers in Purgatory

  Victoria sat on a fallen tree trunk by the side of the road and rubbed her ankle, wishing that the footwear she had chosen in the TARDIS had been more suited to healthy outdoor pursuits.

  Fetching though her calf-length patent leather boots were, the spiky heels had sunk deep into the woodland earth and now, on the tarmacadam of the road, had allowed no greater pace than a tottering walk until one of the heels broke off. The new leather had cut into her and she had turned her ankle to, as it were, boot. All things considered, she considered herself fortunate not to have broken it.

  ‘Come along, Victoria,’ the Doctor called from further up the road. All but lost in the dark, he and Jamie were dragging the unconscious girl on a makeshift tree-branch trellis. Or rather, Jamie was dragging her, the Doctor having directed the original fashioning of the trellis by way of much helpful advice, before declaring that all that brain work had quite tired him out. He was subsequently flitting around and about to pick and sniff indiscriminately at various items of roadside vegetation, in the manner of one prancing happily about in a meadow on a summer’s eve. Possibly, he was putting on this performance in an attempt to keep their spirits up. If so, thought Victoria glumly, it was meeting with a noticeable lack of success.

  After finding it impossible to enter the TARDIS through the front doors, the Doctor had tried several alternative routes, involving first one of the back panels, then what he referred to as the occasional cat flap and, finally, clambering on to the roof and attempting to prise open its central beacon. Each of these had met with the same degree of fruition as his current attempts to lighten their spirits. At length he had admitted that they were, in all probability, stuck here for what he termed the duration - whatever the duration might happen to be. The first priority was still, the Doctor had continued, to find medical assistance for this young lady here, and with the TARDIS

  inaccessible that meant taking her into town - trading off the advisability of moving her against that of leaving her, and any of them, alone in the comparative wilds. Who knew who, or what, might come along.

  It had taken them an hour or more so far to spot a road and then to travel it. The lights from the city ahead were just enough to see by, but Victoria’s journeys in the TARDIS, to worlds and lands with rather more advanced methods of transport than her own, had spoilt her. What she wouldn’t give, now, for a hypergravity belt, or a jet-skimmer, or an atomic-powered ornithopter. She would settle, she admitted to herself ruefully, for a pony-drawn omnibus.

  Victoria sighed, broke off her remaining heel, pulled her boots on again and flatfootedly hurried to catch up with her companions.

  ‘You’re just in time,’ the Doctor said happily, when she did.

  ‘I think I hear a vehicle of some sort coming.’

  Victoria couldn’t hear anything at this point, but this did not surprise her. She knew that the little man possessed senses of a remarkable acuity. All the same, hope did not precisely spring in her breast. Thus far they had encountered a grand tally of two automobiles. One, a big, growling, smoking article with blazing headlamps and fins on its tail that gave the impression it was about to take flight - or at the very least swim at the first opportunity - had slowed down as it approached Victoria, but speeded up again as it got close enough for the pale man within it to see that she was not alone.

/>   Victoria tried to think as charitably of this as she could - that the poor man had simply found his nerve insufficient to cope with what was obviously a rather problematical state of affairs -

  but she was finding this a bit of a push. The second occurrence had been, if anything, even less ambiguous: a large, blocky vehicle like a motorised cart with, in a trailer, a collection of rough-looking young men who had thrown beer-smelling tin cans at them and then roared off, laughing mockingly, to a drunken cavalcade of rifle shots aimed, one could but hope, into the air.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the Doctor said cheerfully, entirely aware, it seemed, of her misgivings. It’s only a matter of time. People are only too happy to help those in distress, most of them anyway, if you only give them the chance.’

  ‘Can’t come soon enough for me,’ said Jamie, who had taken advantage of this pause to set down the trellis and the girl, and was rubbing at his shoulders. ‘I think my arms are coming loose.’

  The lights of an automobile came into view from around a curve in the road. In addition to the ferociously dazzling electrical headlamps that Victoria was coming to realise were quite common in this place and time, she saw an arrangement of flashing blue and red lights arranged across the roof of what she thought of as the vehicle’s steering cab.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ the Doctor said, triumphantly, waving frantically at the approaching car. ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, that vehicle belongs to the local forces of law and order. Our troubles are over.’

  It was not exactly common for a chief of police to be awake and out of bed (or at least, awake and out of the certain kind of establishment to which senior officials the whole world over tend to gravitate) at 2.15 in the morning. Police Chief Clancy Tilson, on the other hand, was an uncommon police chief.

  His dedication to the law was unwavering and had never been corrupted - not because of a refusal to take advantage of the more interesting opportunities his position afforded, but because they had simply never occurred to him.

  Legend had it amongst Lychburg’s proponents of organised crime (Big Vinnie’s Bar and Deli - accident insurance, boogie pharmaceuticals and introductions to accommodating young ladies a speciality) that he had once and in all innocence given a sizeable wad of greenbacks back to Big Vinnie’s cousin, Diminutive Norris, thinking he had dropped it by mistake. And, tellingly, he had completely failed to notice the rather boisterous and illegal poker game going on in the next room. While his basically somnolent nature would ordinarily have him tucked up in bed with a malted milky drink by the early evening, his willingness to be called out at all hours to deal personally with any tricky situation or case was just one of the qualities that had the good people of Lychburg voting him back into office for twenty years in the face of all comers. The question of whether any of these tricky situations or cases were actually solved was neither here nor there.

  ‘As I said before,’ the unkempt, battered little man across the table from him in the interview room in the South Street Precinct House said, ‘myself, my niece and her young friend were on a camping holiday, rambling through the mighty and majestic redwoods and pines of your splendid country and so forth, when we happened on a car accident. The young man - I assume it was a young man - who was in the car was clearly beyond help, so we were simply trying to get the young lady... how is she, by the way?’

  Tilson turned to Sergeant Smee, who stood by the door.

  ‘What about the girl?’

  The sergeant shrugged. ‘Mercy Hill, I think. That was where the paramedics came from. I’ll have it checked.’

  ‘I’d be very grateful,’ said the little man.

  There was something a little wrong about that, Tilson thought. It was as if the little man just naturally assumed that Smee was going to check up on the girl for him, as a special favour, rather than merely following the orders of his chief.

  ‘So anyway,’ the little man continued, ‘two of your officers happened to come along. and so I naturally flagged them down. Mr Wijikwaski and Mr Garcia, I think their names were, from what I saw of those little name tags they had. I said,

  “Could you be of some assistance, officers?” and either Officer Garcia or Officer Wijikwaski - I forget which - said...’

  The little man scratched the head under his Three Stooges cut for a moment as though trying to recall.

  ‘Ah, yes. “Down on your face, dirtbag. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe. I can make a hole you can see through.” Yes, I think that was it...'

  ‘So, while myself and my young companions were lying on our faces, not moving and trying our very hardest not to breathe, Officer Garcia or Officer Wijikwaski, one or the other, made the comment that we didn’t come from around these parts. I mentioned that, to cut a long story short, we were visitors from the British Isles and he muttered something or other about Benedict Arnold and they arrested us on the spot. I’m afraid I had to prevail upon them rather hard to call an ambulance for the injured young lady before they dragged us here.’ The little man sniffed. ‘My friends are still in your holding cells, hopefully making lots of new friends. It seems a bit of a harsh reward for trying to help a victim of a road accident.’

  Put like that, it was difficult to deny what he said. A patrol car had been dispatched to Coogan’s Bluff and confirmed that there was indeed the still-smouldering wreckage of a car there, registered to a Norman E. Manley and containing, so dental records would probably confirm, the body of that same Norman E.

  Manley. In that respect, the stranger’s story checked out... but there were other suspicious elements.

  Chief Tilson opened the manila folder before him and extracted a number of items.

  ‘You were brought here and we took mugshots,’ he said, flipping one of the photographs across the table for the little man to peruse. It was completely fogged.

  ‘I think you must have had a faulty batch of film,’ the man speculated blandly. ‘I’d send a sharp note to your suppliers, if I were you.’

  Tilson showed him another item. ‘Your fingerprints. We took your fingerprints, too.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ The little man beamed. ‘To send to Interpol, no doubt, to check that I’m not some mad international Anarchist bomber wanted for the shocking murder of the Queen and several corgis or some such.’

  ‘Interpol, uh, yeah,’ said Tilson, uncertainly. It was as if the word had been stored in some Section of his brain that was missing. He tried and failed to make some kind of mental connection with the word, and then simply forgot about it.

  ‘Look at your prints,’ he said, roughly pulling himself together and sliding the card across the table. The little man peered at the fingerprint smudges impassively, as though he couldn’t plainly see that they were simple blobs of ink, with none of the whorls and sutures fingerprints commonly have.

  ‘What sort of man has no fingerprints, is what I’m thinking,’ Tilson said. ‘The sort of man who takes them off with acid or sandpaper, I’m thinking. The sort of man who has something to hide...’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the little man. ‘I wasn’t thinking at the time.’

  ‘What?’ said Tilson, suspiciously.

  ‘I mean that I pressed down too hard. Nerves, you know. Do you mind if I borrow this for a moment?’

  Tilson’s steel-cased ballpoint pen, presented to him at the inaugural Annual Sons of the Frontier Dinner some years ago, was suddenly in the little man’s hand. Tilson, who had simply pulled on overcoat over his pyjamas on being woken up an hour before, had been completely unaware of even having it on him - although he now seemed to remember putting it in his overcoat pocket some while ago.

  The little man, meanwhile, was industriously rubbing the nib of the pen over a finger, which he then pressed with theatrical lightness against a corner of the fingerprint card. He held the card up and, without even looking closely, Tilson could see a perfectly ordinary print.

  ‘Now I’ll be quite happy to supply new ones,’ said the little man, ‘and even pose for
another photograph, if you can find some film that hasn’t been contaminated. But I really think there is no reason whatsoever to keep me or my young friends here a minute longer. Other than the fact that we’re strangers and you don’t like strangers. Don’t you agree, Chief Tilson?’

  Tilson tried to remember if he had ever, as such, told the little man his name. The crack about strangers also rankled. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t some slack-jawed yokel who pulled out a twelve-gauge shotgun and blasted off a face he didn’t know.

  But then again... there was a wrongness about the little man in front of him, a sense that he shouldn’t be here. It was like that show he had seen on the Discovery Channel, about how baboons or some kind of monkey killed other monkeys who were not a part of their troop, or the feeling you get in a room when someone walks in who is not welcome.

  Thinking about it, he could see how things could get out of hand. All these recent murders had tensions in the South Street Precinct running high. The papers and the TV news hadn’t made the connection between them yet, merely reporting each case as and when it occurred, but within the police department itself there was a sense that people were looking for somebody to blame when the big story finally broke. Tilson was not the most perceptive of men but even he could see how the two patrolmen, Billy-Joe Wijikwaski and Johnny-Bob Garcia, could have instantly and blankly suspected a group of strangers, simply for the fact that they were strangers out at night...

  ‘Murders?’ the little man said, sharply. Tilson must have muttered something out loud. ‘What’s this about murders?’

  There was something in his tone that cut through all the police chief’s layers of suspicion to hit some automatic and reflexive core, like the little man was a teacher, snapping out a question that you had to answer instantly. ‘I think you’d better tell me all about it.’