Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (3 page)

gulp of wine and then grimaced. ‘A bit like this wine. What are you drinking?’

She turned and shouted over to the bar, ‘Gaston, what kind of filth are you trying to pass off on my friends? Bring us something decent immediately or I shall be forced to dine here all next week. And if you don’t bring the wine here in thirty seconds I shall bring all my friends with me when I come.’

The woman returned her attention to the Doctor and Chris. ‘I’m Tilda, Tilda Jupp.’ She extended a hand which the Doctor kissed lightly. Chris shook it politely.

‘I’m the Doctor and this is my friend, Christopher Cwej.’

‘The Doctor? How mysterious. I like that in a man.’

Gaston arrived with the wine. After three glasses had been poured, Tilda asked what had brought the two travellers to Soho.

‘We’re resting in London for a little while,’ the Doctor explained. ‘Planning to see the sights, that sort of thing.’

Tilda brightened. ‘Then you can’t possibly miss out on an evening at the Tropics. It’s a little club I run. Strictly informal. Opens after the pubs shut.

Theatre people mostly. The drinks aren’t cheap, but I’m sure you’ll adore it.’

She brandished a card which the Doctor perused politely.

‘Ah, it sounds intriguing, but I’m afraid it’s a little past my bedtime. However, it sounds perfect for my companion,’ the Doctor commented, handing the card over to Chris.

‘Then that’s settled. I shall expect you at eleven, Christopher.’

Chris nodded wearily, knowing that the Doctor wasn’t going to allow him a quiet evening on his own. ‘Very well, eleven it is, Ms Jupp.’

‘Oh call me Mother,
deah
,’ Tilda said as she knocked back the last of her wine and made to leave. ‘Everyone does.’

The Doctor made his way through the side streets of Soho, using his extensive knowledge of the city to take a quiet short-cut back to where the TARDIS

stood, waiting patiently for him. He didn’t want to walk amongst the crowds tonight, didn’t want to be surrounded by the human creatures who populated this tiny world. Despite his fascination with them, tonight they seemed too fragile and he too clumsy to be in their company. For once, he wasn’t on the lookout for adventure, didn’t want to get caught up in someone else’s problems, or help the vulnerable fight back against tyranny and cruelty. Tonight this little blue-green planet would just have to look out for itself.

He stopped outside the TARDIS and rummaged in the pockets of his tweed jacket for the key and fiddled with the odd-looking instrument between his fingers. Well, tonight he would let himself rest. He’d tinker with the TARDIS

systems or perhaps just sit by the fire in the library and read. He was relieved that Chris seemed to have made a new friend. He smiled to himself – even if he 10

had taken a little persuading. That young man could use a few distractions.

He could benefit from being reminded that although Roslyn Forrester was dead, he, himself, was still alive.

As the Doctor slipped the key into the lock of the police box door, he heard a low moan from somewhere near his feet. He froze – the key half in the lock.

In the long shadow of the alley wall lay the body of a young man. His clothes were drenched from the rain and his blond hair was plastered to his head in short rat-tails. A dark puddle spilt out from beneath his blue-white face. Air bubbled up through the blood which frothed in the corners of his mouth.

The Doctor stared at the boy for a long moment before looking up at the sliver of night visible above the alley. ‘Couldn’t you try and get along without me, just once?’ he whispered. ‘Just for tonight? Just for a little time?’

And then putting such indulgent thoughts away in a battered box somewhere deep in his mind, the Doctor tucked the TARDIS key back into one of his many pockets and began to tend to the boy’s wounds.

11

2

Used To Be A Sweet Boy

‘Let me get this straight in my head, sir. Are you saying that you don’t know at what time the young man was admitted to the hospital?’

‘He wasn’t actually admitted at all. We found the patient in one of the cubicles in casualty being tended by. . . well, by someone unknown to the hospital.’

Chief Inspector Harris frowned. ‘I see. And what did this man look like?’

‘I don’t know,’ the young doctor replied. ‘I wasn’t down there then. Sister ought to know, I think she was the one who discovered him.’

Chief Inspector Harris turned to his sergeant. ‘Track down the sister and bring her up here, would you, Bridie?’

His young Irish sergeant nodded eagerly and, clutching his notebook in his hand, left the staffroom which Harris had commandeered for the investigation. Harris felt little cheered by this display of enthusiasm. He turned back to the junior doctor whose name he’d forgotten.

‘So, a person unknown enters your hospital this evening in the company of a severely injured young man, uses the hospital’s facilities without any nurse or doctor knowing anything about it, and then disappears into thin air immediately after being discovered. I’d say that you’ve got a bit of a security problem here, wouldn’t you?’

Harris didn’t wait for an answer from the harassed-looking young man in front of him. Poor bugger probably hadn’t slept in a week. Harris dismissed him after asking him to call the station if he remembered anything else.

Alone in the staffroom, Harris exhaled and wandered over to the window which looked out upon Cleveland Street. The investigation was undoubtedly the most important of the year, certainly the most important that he had ever worked upon, and the evidence was fast disappearing into the air.

Sergeant Bridie returned accompanied by a distressed-looking nurse. Sister Martin clutched a handkerchief in her hand, which she used to punctuate every sentence, dabbing at her wrinkled, red eyes.

Harris listened silently to her account, taking slow, deep breaths to try to suppress the mounting frustration he felt. He had rather hoped that Sister Martin would provide a clue to the identity of the boy, but it was clear that 13

she knew little more than the young doctor he had interviewed. Sister Martin had been guiding a seven-year-old girl with a broken wrist to what she had assumed was a vacant curtained bay in casualty, only to discover it occupied by a man and a boy. Her account was strangely incomplete. Although she could remember exactly what the man had said and done, she had no memory of what he looked like. It was as if that information had been plucked from her mind.

The man, now faceless in her memory, had looked up from tending to the boy, and said: ‘Ah, Nurse, there you are at last. We’re going to need at least four pints of blood, fresh dressings, sterile instruments and you’d better put whatever provision you have for cardiac arrest on standby – just as a precau-tion you understand, but we can’t be too careful.’

At this point in her story, Sister Martin had paused and swallowed painfully before continuing. For the faceless man had dipped a finger casually into one of the open wounds on the boy’s neck, licked it and – as if identifying a good wine – had announced: ‘O Rhesus negative, if I’m not mistaken. At the rate this young man is losing the stuff, I think you’d better make that five pints.

Now be a good person and hurry. There’s an outside chance that we might save this young fellow’s life.’

Fighting back her shock and nausea, Sister Martin had ordered the man to stand away from the boy before he did any more damage, and then had called for assistance. After trying in vain to persuade her to let him stay and help, the man had darted off when he spotted two orderlies hurrying down the corridor towards him. By the time they had arrived on the scene the intruder had completely disappeared.

Despite every effort by the casualty staff, the boy had died twenty minutes later. He hadn’t regained consciousness.

‘Nothing like this has ever happened here before,’ the sister concluded. ‘I still can’t believe that it could happen in this department, and whilst I was on duty. I’m responsible for that lad’s death, Chief Inspector. If I’d only been more vigilant, then that lunatic would never have got near him and we might have been able to provide proper treatment.’

Harris silently indicated to Bridle that the interview was at an end and he watched his sergeant gently guide the middle-aged woman from the room. A question formed in Harris’s mind as they reached the door, and he’d voiced it before he realized how crazy it was.

‘Sister Martin. What did the boy’s blood type turn out to be?’

‘O Rhesus negative, Inspector,’ she managed, before bursting into tears once more.

∗ ∗ ∗

14

The morgue was tucked away at the back of the lower-ground floor of the Middlesex Hospital. It took Chief Inspector Harris a good ten minutes to find the long cool room; hospitals are not in the business of publicizing the existence and hence the locations of their mortuaries. Marble-topped benches were spaced regularly throughout the room which was in semi-darkness. The morgue had a distinctive odour: Harris recognized the stale sweet scent of death that no amount of cleaning and disinfectant could scrub away.

The room was windowless. The outlines of the bare bricks of the walls were visible despite layers of thick creamy paint. The only source of light came from a single lamp which burnt above one of the benches. A naked human shape lay on top. Someone was working late this evening. Harris paused in the doorway unsure whether he wanted to disturb the worker from their grim trade. If it hadn’t been for the matter of the boy’s missing personal possessions Harris would have turned on his heel and left.

The sound of water running from a tap came from a small door beyond the slab. Harris walked over to the corpse. There was no doubt that it was the boy who had been brought to the hospital earlier that evening. Even if he hadn’t recognized him from the description, he would have known those wounds anywhere.

The sound of the running water stopped. Harris, suddenly aware that he was present without invitation, glanced back anxiously at the door through which he had entered.

‘Don’t feel that you have to leave on my account.’

Harris turned to see a small man standing in the doorway of an anteroom.

He was dressed in a mortician’s robe and was drying his hands on a paper towel. The man wore a hygiene mask over his mouth. A few strands of dark wavy hair escaped from beneath a paper hairnet. Only his eyes were clearly visible; icy blue and bright with intelligence and curiosity.

Harris didn’t recognize this pathologist from the hundreds of crime scenes he had attended during his long tenure at Charing Cross. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Doctor. . . ?’ Harris began.

The robed man didn’t seem to hear the question. ‘You’re not disturbing me, Chief Inspector. I’m merely doing a preliminary examination before the chief pathologist conducts the autopsy.’

‘That’ll be Salter, won’t it?’

‘Salter? Oh, that’s right. Good man. Tell me, have you ever seen anything like this before?’

‘Oh yes,’ Harris murmured. The two deep gouges at the base of the boy’s neck were all too familiar. Large sections of flesh had been hastily and untidily removed. Harris met the pathologist’s gaze. ‘This lad is the sixth. I’ve seen this five times in the last six months.’

15

The pathologist paused in his examination. Harris noticed that he ran his fingers absently through the dead boy’s blond hair. The gesture was distinctly paternal. ‘Six people have been killed like this?’

Harris tensed at the unspoken accusation, suddenly feeling that he had to defend his investigation. ‘Look, Doctor. . . ’

The pathologist just stared at him.

‘Look, er, Doctor. I’m working flat out on this case, but none of the usual procedures are producing any positive results.’ Harris found himself telling this strange nameless doctor about the investigation. ‘The fifth victim was a coloured girl. No more than seventeen. Chinese kids from one of the big laundries found her stuffed behind a bush while they were playing ball in Soho Square.’

The Doctor winced. ‘And the mode of killing was the same?’

‘Exactly like this poor lad.’ Harris looked at the body of the boy. You didn’t have to be a pathologist to know that the same man was behind both killings.

‘You said that usual police methods weren’t working?’

‘They aren’t. Not at all. Despite what you might read in the papers, Doctor, the majority of murders are easy to solve. At Charing Cross, our clear-up rate for murder is three times better than it is for burglary or arson. For all the shouting that goes on about the streets not being safe any more, the person who is most likely to do away with you is not some deranged lunatic but your nearest and dearest. Unless of course they’re one and the same person.

In most murder investigations our first step is to take the husband – and it usually is the husband – down to the station for a little chat. If it’s not the husband, then it’s a work mate, brother or friend.’

‘But stranger killings are different, aren’t they?’ the Doctor interrupted.

‘The connection between the killer and the victim is not their relationship, it is something else, something indirect.’

‘In these murders, there is no connection at all.’

The Doctor leant over the corpse to examine the boy’s neck, probing the ragged wounds with his fingertips. Harris was slightly unsettled to notice that the Doctor wasn’t wearing surgical gloves.

‘Oh, there are always connections, Chief Inspector. They’re just harder to find.’

‘Normally I’d agree with you, but not in this case. This is completely different to anything I’ve worked on before. We’ve been unable to track down any relatives for the victims, living or dead. No personal records at all.’

‘Interesting. Perhaps they’ve come from another planet.’

‘Very funny, sir. I’m a police officer, I don’t read science fiction.’

The Doctor smiled. ‘Really, Chief Inspector? I’m rather fond of it myself.

But reality is always so much more interesting, don’t you find? Now tell me, 16