Doctor Who_ Father Time Part 22

'Bazz-dud,' Barry managed. The effort of sitting up was too much for someone who'd literally not moved a muscle in five years.

The Deputy pulled out a long knife, waved it in front of Barry's face. 'I want you to know who I am. So you know who has killed you. There's no sport in killing a man in a coma.'

And Sallak was swinging his arm round, and there was a long, curved knife in it, and he was stabbing Barry through the chest.

Barry tried to reach for his chest, tried to breathe. He coughed up blood.

Debbie screamed.

The young man smacked her down on to the floor. She sat sprawled there, holding her jaw.

The three of them watched Barry die, choking on his own blood. Debbie couldn't believe it was real. It felt like watching a video nasty, not like she was in the room. Her husband had little strength; finally he collapsed. A minute later, the Deputy checked his pulse.

'Dead,' he announced, unnecessarily.

'One of our enemies dead. And another delivered to us.' He looked down at Debbie.

'You woke him up,' she told the Deputy. 'You could have told the hospital how to do it at any point, but you didn't.

The Deputy smiled. 'Revenge,' he said simply. 'He killed the Prefect, this man's brother.'

Debbie looked up at the young man. She could see the family resemblance. But this was a young man, almost young enough to be the Prefect's son.

'Where is the Last One?' he asked.

'Miranda?' she said, before clamming up.

The Deputy took something from his pocket. One of the little devices that had turned Barry into a vegetable, that had threatened to do the same to the Doctor. A mindeater.

'She lives with the Doctor,' Debbie told him quickly.

'Where?'

'I don't know. We... we lost touch. He moved down South.'

The Deputy seemed to know she was telling the truth.

The young man fished a newspaper cutting from his jacket pocket. 'We know what he is doing. But we want his address. It is not a matter of public record.'

'I can't help you.'

The Deputy sneered at her. 'Oh, I think you can.'

Bob was standing by the drinks machine, trying to get his money out, when Miranda came over. She was a tiny bit shorter than he was, but because she was a girl, she looked taller. She was, by common consent, very good-looking, but no one who'd ever asked her out had got anywhere. There was something odd about her. She was attractive, but as.e.xual. She just didn't give out the vibes. Bob didn't, either, it seemed, but with Miranda it seemed to be out of choice.

'h.e.l.lo, Bob.'

Bob liked Miranda. He liked anyone who called him 'Bob' without doing a Rowan Atkinson impersonation.

'It's stuck,' he told her. 'It says it's giving change but it isn't.'

'I wanted some orange juice,' Miranda told him.

'Stick with the coffee,' Bob advised. 'The orange juice is called that because of the colour, not the flavour.'

A plastic cup popped out and started filling with orange juice. 'Oh, I don't believe this,' Bob moaned. 'I press the b.u.t.tons and nothing happens, I say "orange juice" and it can't stop itself dispensing.'

He reached in for the orange juice. Before he'd finished taking the cup away, another one popped out and started filling.

'Coffee!' he yelled, yanking his hand away.

'Bob,' Miranda said gently, taking the orange juice from him, 'do you want to go out sometime?'

It took a moment for the question to sink in. Bob spent the time sucking juice off his fingers. 'Me and you?'

'As friends. I mean just the two of us, see how it goes?' He must have had the oddest expression on his face, because Miranda said, 'You look horrified.'

'No,' Bob said, very quickly. 'No. Yes.'

Miranda looked puzzled as she sipped her drink.

'I'd love to,' Bob confirmed. 'Er... so, do you want to go to Dinah's party with me?'

Miranda looked very determined. 'Yes.'

Bob grinned, unable to believe his luck. On the one hand Miranda had just asked him out. On the other hand... boiling coffee.

He let Miranda disappear before he squealed with pain.

Miranda got off the bus, smiling to herself.

She hadn't expected Bob to turn her down, but she was relieved that the process had been completed smoothly. It was something of a relief that she would be going to the party with someone. She'd reached the age when everyone seemed to be paired off when they went out, and she ended up in a corner, cogitating about the anthropology of the situation.

The sun was s.h.i.+ning, too. Spring was under way, the trees beginning to bud.

The iron gates swung open automatically at her presence. Actually, the presence of a gizmo she had on her keyring, but the effect was the same.

Dad was home the Trabant sat incongruously on the gravel drive.

She let herself in and called out that she was back.

There was no answer, so she made a couple of mugs of coffee and took them through to the lab.

Her father was there, in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves, rifling through a pile of handwritten notes. She glanced at them.

'Five-dimensional vectors,' she said. Looking over at the blackboard, she saw a string of equations. She crossed over, tried to work her way through them. 'This is a bit beyond O-level maths,' she said.

'So are you,' the Doctor reminded her. She knew what he was really telling her: you can work it out for yourself.

She had another look.

'Co-ordinates,' she said. 'It's the description of the path of an object. But it's travelling in five dimensions. Then... this bit is... That's notation I'm not sure about.

'Ordnance Survey grid references,' the Doctor said, without looking up.

He'd taken the road atlas out of the Trabant. It was sitting on the workbench by the jar he kept her milk teeth in. Miranda thumbed through it.

'Oh, I see. Northern England.'

The Doctor looked up. 'What do you mean Northern England? Great Britain, yes, well done, but it's impossible to pinpoint it closer than about a thousand kilometres.'

'You've made a mistake,' she told him, tapping the blackboard. 'You've missed out...'

He was already alongside her. 'Of course, of course.' He crossed out the offending symbols and replaced them with the right ones. 'And the implication is that the exact co-ordinates can be narrowed further. Down to '

'To within a metre and a second,' Miranda guessed.

'Perhaps not that far.'

Miranda smiled. She found it funny that the Doctor could get so worked up about a theoretical problem.

The phone in the hall started ringing.

'Could you get that?' he asked. 'It's probably for you.'

Miranda scowled. She thought she'd proved beyond all statistical doubt, and despite her dad's insistence, that when the phone rang, it was almost always for him.

She trudged out into the hall, leaving him to his scribblings.

'I'm coming, I'm coming,' she told the phone.

She picked up the handset.

'h.e.l.lo?'

A terse man on the other end asked if she had a pen. She had. He asked her to write down an address, then told her to take it to the Doctor and tell him that was where he would find Debbie Castle. Then he hung up.

Miranda was annoyed with the rude behaviour. So annoyed, that she was halfway back to the lab before she remembered who Debbie Castle was.

She handed her dad the address.

He was almost out of the room, grabbing his coat from the hook on the door.

'I've got to go somewhere,' he said. 'You look after yourself.'

Miranda was surprised, to say the least. 'Where are you going?'

'North.' He smiled.

Chapter Thirteen.

The Black Tower Night was falling as the Doctor drove into the city.

The motorway came in over the hills, and he saw the city laid out before him, a murky orange starscape that stretched to the horizon in three directions. It was a magnificent sight, like a living organism with the lights of the cars as corpuscles on the arterial roads. There were aircraft overhead, and smoke drifted from the few factories and mills that had yet to close.

As he drove along the flyover, the buildings began getting taller. He wasn't heading into the city centre, with its brightly lit concrete shopping areas and office blocks, or the new ca.n.a.l development, where the old warehouses and mills had been converted into smart new flats and all-night cafes and clubs and multiscreen cinemas.

He came off the flyover just before either of those.

The buildings here were falling into ruin, even though they were barely older than Miranda. The skyline was dominated by grey tower blocks that looked like all the Coronation Street terraces they had replaced piled up on top of each other and covered in pebble-dashed concrete. It was difficult to believe that anyone had thought this was the best solution to urban overcrowding unless it had been designed to drive people away from the city. It was almost deserted here, even at eight in the evening. Thick metal shutters over every shop window, nothing but piles of litter to suggest anyone had been here recently. There were a few people, huddling like moths around the warm light of the takeaways and the taxi offices.

His car pa.s.sed a couple of men pus.h.i.+ng each other around on the pavement. The Doctor couldn't tell if they were playing around, or really starting a fight. He was itching to intervene, but remembered that he was here for Debbie, and drove past.

Why had Sallak come here? Perhaps he had made local contacts while he was in prison. Perhaps he had come to a place where crime was commonplace and there was little in the way of police presence.

The Doctor didn't need to check the address: the Tower stood out, a monolithic structure in the middle of a building site that was gradually becoming a garden for weeds and gra.s.ses. The ground was dark, deserted. There were no street lights, no source of light for a hundred yards.

There was a road encircling the waste ground, and the Doctor drove the Trabant all the way around it to get a better idea of the lie of the land. There were lights on at the top of the tower. Thirty or forty storeys up, it was difficult to be more precise.

That was where Sallak was keeping Debbie.

The Deputy would have a commanding view. If he had binoculars and the Doctor didn't doubt that he would he could very well already have seen the Trabant and recognised it from their last encounter.

The Doctor found a well-lit street to park in not that there was much danger of anyone stealing a Trabant. He stowed the earphone in the boot, took his briefcase out and locked the car. He started heading for the Tower, hoping he'd come up with some sort of strategy en route.

It was as though a patch of an alien planet had been imposed on the city. All around the edges of the wasteland life went on as normal: late buses, street lamps, sloping roofs. But here was a no-man's-land of burned-out garages and sheds, overgrown paths and bare trees that had failed to bud this spring.

And, overshadowing it all, the Tower itself.

The Doctor picked his way across the ground. It was dark, but also quite open. He could hear things scrabbling around twenty feet to his left: dogs, perhaps even foxes. On the other side of the Tower there was a small campfire. Children, intravenous drug users, the homeless or perhaps a combination of the three. He could hear them talking, laughing, trying to sound tough.

But no one approached him and there was no sign of activity from the Tower.

The Deputy wanted him dead, the Doctor had no doubt about that. But most of all he wanted to watch the Doctor die and seeing it through the sights of a sniper's rifle wouldn't satisfy that desire.

The Doctor had reached the base of the Tower. The first four floors were all boarded up. 'Condemned' notices were plastered all over the place. The place smelled of urine and ash.

There was movement inside.