Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (13 page)

‘Then it’s just you and me.’ The cork popped, ricocheting across the compartment, smashing a glass on another table. Champagne erupted from the bottle pouring down Patsy’s arm. ‘Good,’ she added, unperturbed by the mess, and poured out two glasses.

‘Here’s to our mission,’ Patsy toasted.

Chris raised his glass and took the tiniest sip of champagne. ‘You still haven’t told me very much about it.’ He set the glass down and moved it purposely to one side. ‘Or about yourself.’

‘There’s not much to tell.’

Chris burst out laughing. ‘You’re an extraterrestrial in hiding on Earth in the 1950s and there’s not much to tell?’

‘You can talk, future boy.’ Patsy glanced at him sharply. ‘Christopher, you’re not going to make this difficult are you?’

‘I suspect I am.’

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I’ll tell you. I come from a place far away from here.

And don’t ask me exactly where,’ she added quickly, ‘because I don’t know things like that.’

‘What’s the name of your planet?’

Patsy appeared to consider this for a moment. ‘Petruska,’ she said, finally.

‘I haven’t heard of it. What’s it like?’

‘Horrible. Authoritarian. Brutish.’ She sighed at the memory. ‘Mother, I mean Tilda, and the Major and I are all members of a racial minority. A 69

servile class. You’ve probably guessed by now that we’re empathic, haven’t you?’

Chris nodded. ‘I felt your concern for the Major during the fire. Like words in my head.’

‘We’re not really telepathic, more empathic, and only when the emotions are intensely felt.’

An image of Roz entered his thoughts suddenly. Staring at him, her face contorted into a sneer.
Stay the hell out of my mind.

The train juddered once, and made a series of clanking noises before pushing its way out of Liverpool Street Station.

‘What is it?’ Patsy said, staring intently at him.

‘Telepathy frightens me. I was infected with a telepathic virus. I couldn’t control the ability and. . . I almost lost a friend.’

Patsy raised an eyebrow. ‘People rarely thank you for reading their mind.’

Chris thought of Roz. Change the subject, Chris. ‘So, tell me about your race.’

Patsy shrugged. ‘OK. We’re not really telepathic. Our true abilities are in empathy – our ability to sense other’s moods and respond accordingly. At. . .

On Petruska, we’ve traditionally been employed as companions for wealthy people who want to. . . ’ Patsy paused and then said with great bitterness, ‘get in touch with their feelings. Their inner selves. You know.’

The emotion in her voice surprised Chris. ‘You’re like a sort of therapist?’

he asked.

‘More like a slave, actually.’

There was an awkward pause. ‘So how did you come to be on Earth?’

‘Oh, we had support on our world. People who didn’t believe we should be treated as second-class citizens. Do-gooders, you know. Our world is far more advanced than this one. When the campaign for equality failed, our friends provided the technology to allow us to flee. We’ve been trying to live secretly in London.’ She shrugged. ‘Places like Soho attract bohemians and eccentrics –’ she looked directly at him ‘– and we’re not so very different from you. We thought we’d be safe.’

‘And after last night, you’re not so sure?’

‘Not just last night. Some of my people in London have been killed. Murdered. I suppose it could be coincidence, but Tilda’s worried that our oppres-sors have followed our trail here.’

The train had left the grey buildings of London behind. The view from the window had changed into a blur of green and blue. Countryside. Chris had been brought up in a world of concrete and plastic; he always felt a simple thrill every time the TARDIS brought him somewhere relatively unspoilt. It 70

suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t know their exact destination. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To collect some new arrivals. More of my people who’ve managed to escape.’

‘I know that. But where are they? You’ve only said that they’re in Essex.’

‘I’ve been given the name of one of the Major’s contacts on the East coast.

It’s a place on the Thames Estuary called Healey. Have you heard of it?’

Chris shook his head. ‘Should I have?’

‘I don’t know; it’s your planet.’

‘Not for another century or three, it’s not.’

‘According to Mother, Healey is a. . . a village,’ Patsy pronounced the word carefully, as if this were the first time she’d spoken it out loud. ‘I’ve never been to a village. Mother says they’re ghastly places; no wine bars or restaurants
at
all
.’

Her indignation was endearing. ‘How shocking!’ Chris laughed.

‘Too right!’ She grinned. ‘More champagne?’

The chief inspector was contemplating slipping out for lunch, when the Doctor popped his head around the door of his cubby-hole of an office. The little man appeared a little distracted, unsettled even.

The Doctor plonked himself down in front of the chief inspector’s desk and sighed heavily. He leant on an elbow, his cheek wrinkling beneath his hand.

‘Chief Inspector, I’ve lost my friend.’

Harris considered this for a moment. Did he mean the bag lady he’d spoken to that morning? ‘Do you want to make a missing persons report?’

The Doctor’s face creased into a frown. ‘I don’t think it’s that serious.’ His eyes opened expressively. ‘At least, I hope not.’

Harris wanted to ask the Doctor about this business with the taxi. The description of the morning’s events recounted by Bridie had been bizarre in the extreme. Apparently, the Doctor had led the young sergeant to a small side street where the old woman had claimed to see a taxi swallow a young woman whole. Bridie had been furious at being sent on such a fool’s errand.

And frankly, Harris couldn’t blame him.

However, before he had the opportunity to ask the Doctor what the hell he’d been up to, the little man’s attention had been arrested by the photos which were scattered across Harris’s desk. His eyes were eagerly scanning the photographs taken at the various crime scenes.

Glancing up at Harris for a moment the Doctor muttered, ‘These are from our case?’

Harris nodded. Surprised to discover just how relieved he was to hear the Doctor refer to the murder inquiry as ‘ours’. After making sympathetic noises 71

about the difficulties of the case, the chief superintendent had made it pretty clear that he was going to hand the inquiry on if Harris didn’t come up with some results. And soon.

The Doctor arranged three of the photographs in front of the chief inspector.

Each one was a close-up of the victim’s throat wounds.

Harris looked from the gruesome pictures to the Doctor and shrugged.

‘Same modus operandi. Same killer. You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know, Doctor.’

The Doctor perched on the edge of the desk and leant over, directing Harris’s attention to the deep cuts in the base of the victims’ throats. ‘But why here? Why make incisions here? It doesn’t make any sense. If the perpetrator intended to kill, why not cut higher? Why not simply open the artery? Slit their throats?’

‘I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to what is going on in this man’s mind.’

The Doctor paused for a moment. ‘Inspector, have you ever heard of psychological profiling?’

‘Psycho-what?’

‘I thought not. To put it in simple language, we need to try and work out what’s going on inside our killer’s head. Why he is committing these heinous acts.’

‘I should have thought that was obvious, Doctor.’

‘Really? Oh, do tell.’

‘Well, because he’s a nutter.’

The Doctor blinked. Twice. ‘Yes, well I think we can do a bit better than that.’ And then he was off, rattling on about his ideas like an excited schoolboy. ‘Look again at the incisions. According to my, not inconsiderable, knowledge of your anatomy, there are no major arteries in any of these places.’

An intuitive part of Chief Inspector Harris reacted with alarm to the Doctor’s use of the word ‘your’ in that context. He swallowed, suppressing a ridiculous thought, and refocused on what the pathologist was saying. ‘Do you mean that they shouldn’t have died of these wounds?’

The Doctor considered this question. ‘Well, not as quickly as they did. In fact I was sure I was going to be able to save the boy, Eddy.’

Harris looked up, frowning. The name was unfamiliar. ‘Eddy who?’

The Doctor opened his mouth and then closed it again. ‘Ah,’ he managed, after a moment. ‘Nothing, Chief Inspector, nothing at all. Now,’ he hurried on, ‘I rather suspect that the reason that these incisions are so large is that something was actually removed from. . . ’

Harris stopped listening to the Doctor’s attempts to divert attention from his slip. He held up his hand to break through the Doctor’s monologue. ‘Doctor, please answer my question. How do you know the dead boy’s name?’

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The Doctor slipped off the desk and sat back in his chair. He looked like a naughty pupil called up in front of the headmaster. Sulky and silent.

‘Doctor, I would remind you that this is a murder inquiry: withholding evidence is a serious criminal offence.’

The Doctor looked defiant for a moment and then his expression collapsed.

‘Oh very well. I found the last murder victim’s personal possessions. I intended to slip them back to you, but. . . well, I’ve been preoccupied with. . . well, that doesn’t matter now. I forgot. But, yes, I do know who he is. Or rather was.’

Harris was barely holding on to his temper. ‘Then why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

‘I. . . um. . . wanted to look into it first. Sorry.’

Harris gave the Doctor a withering look. ‘Quite the amateur detective, aren’t we?’ He called for Bridie, who appeared in the doorway. The sergeant didn’t bother to conceal his disapproval of the Doctor. ‘Sergeant, we’ve got a positive identification on the dead boy. Doctor?’

The Doctor exhaled and dug his hands into the pockets of his trousers. ‘Eddy Stone. He was a hairdresser at Snips Salon, Wardour Street.’

‘I know the place,’ Bridie muttered, jotting the name in his notebook. He turned to his senior officer. ‘Where did this information come from, sir?’

Harris tapped his desk, impatiently. ‘Don’t worry about that now. Just get on with it. Get a home address and see if you can’t find out what the score was at the salon.’

‘Right-o, sir.’ Bridie looked for a moment at the Doctor, who was playing absently with his tie. He shook his head and left.

Harris got up and closed the door behind him, turning the small key in the lock. He didn’t want the whole station to hear this. The Doctor looked a little relieved that Harris had left the key in the door.

After rummaging in his desk drawer for his emergency bottle of scotch, Harris poured out two small glasses and set one of them in front of the Doctor, who eyed it as if he suspected that it might be poison.

‘Doctor, I think you’d better start at the beginning, don’t you?’

They booked into the guest house under the names of Mr and Mrs Christopher Cwej, although it was clear from the look the housekeeper gave that she didn’t believe them for an instant. She led them up to a small, cold room at the top of the house.

‘Hey, I like this,’ Patsy exclaimed sarcastically, as she surveyed the grubby room. ‘Early Nothing.’

Chris winced. Mrs Hardly merely pursed her thin lips and snapped, ‘I lock the door at ten. Breakfast finishes at eight. No animals and no exceptions.’

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With that she marched off, her heavy footsteps loudly sounding her disapproval on the wooden stairs as she descended.

Chris set down the bags he’d been carrying from the station at the bottom of the double bed. ‘Well, at least the place looks lived in.’

‘Yeah, but by what?’

He joined Patsy at the window which provided a view of the village green.

Healey was a pretty if rather unremarkable place; just a hotchpotch of houses clustered around a square of grass. Despite the cold, a group of boys were playing an anarchic game of football on the muddy green. Their hair was cut short, and neatly side-parted. In their long grey macintoshes they looked like miniature grown-ups. It didn’t look like the kind of place where people from another planet would choose to land. A bizarre image of a silver flying saucer – all flashing lights and fins – descending on to the village green popped into Chris’s head. Take me to your leader. Or more likely, Take me to your wine bar, if the people he’d met were representative of the race.

‘I’ve arranged to meet the Major’s contact in the pub.’

‘You do surprise me,’ Chris commented, and started to unpack.

‘Doctor, I just don’t see how these incidents are related.’

‘Nor do I, Chief Inspector, but it’ll be interesting finding out, don’t you think?’

Harris was pacing his office, whisky glass in hand. ‘You’re suggesting that someone is kidnapping people off the streets of London in a black cab.’

‘I rather suspect that it’s the cab itself that’s doing the stealing.’ He ignored Harris’s look of astonishment and took his hat off and idly spun it on his finger.

‘People disappearing just as others appear. Turning up without pasts.’

‘Turning up dead.’ Harris went to take a sip of his drink, but the glass was empty. Bridie had returned from his investigation to confirm that the dead boy was indeed Eddy Stone, although the sergeant hadn’t learnt much more than that. Harris stopped pacing and turned to face the Doctor. ‘My sergeant thinks you should go back to your hospital – mind your own business and leave well alone. Actually, I rather suspect that he thinks you’re a few shillings short of a pound.’

‘I know more than just a couple of people who would agree with him.’

‘If you’re trying to reassure me, Doctor, you’re not doing a very good job of it. Look I only have your word that people are disappearing. I only have your word that there is some mad taxi out there eating people up.’ The look Harris gave the Doctor clearly said that his word didn’t currently count for much.

‘So why are you still talking to me, Chief Inspector? I do hope that you’re not merely humouring me. I should be upset.’