Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire - Andy Lane [63]
Mycroft revealed that the Government had been aware that a larger than usual number of people had left the country bound for India, but in their infinite wisdom had decided not to pursue the matter. The Doctor and I debated how Maupertuis had got to hear about the books, but without success. After that I remember little of our packing and making arrangements. Now, as I sat with the Doctor and Holmes in the dining room of the Matilda Briggs, the time in between the revelations in the Library and that moment seemed like a dream, glimpsed but dimly through a glass.
'We should start planning our itinerary for when we reach Bombay,' Holmes said, breaking into my reverie. 'Maupertuis is on the .S S Soudan, and will have three days' head start on us. Watson, you're something of an expert on matters Indian. How do you suppose we can find the Baron?'
'Well, we'll need to make contact with a local man, preferably one with some influence, to make arrangements over travel and suggest likely places to check hotels and suchlike. Then it's a question of whether Maupertuis is covering his trail or not. If he's not expecting to be followed we should be able to determine his location fairly quickly.' I shook my head.
'If only we had been able to send a message ahead to prepare the way for us.'
'We did,' said the Doctor.
'What do you mean?'
'Didn't I tell you? How remiss of me. I have already been in contact with a friend of mine, who is waiting for us in Bombay. With any luck, she will be able to tell us everything we want to know.'
'And how did you know that you would need someone in Bombay?' Holmes snapped. 'Or was it sheer coincidence?'
The Doctor gazed up at him with an ageless expression on his face, and it was Holmes who looked away first.
'Oh,' said the Doctor finally, 'I have a girl in every port.'
That was the first we heard of Professor Bernice Summerfield, a woman who was to become very dear to my heart in a very short space of time. As she is to play such an important part in the continuation of this narrative, it is only fair that I should let her introduce herself in her own words, from the diary to which she has so very kindly allowed me access.
Chapter 9
In which a new voice takes up the story, and the Doctor is picked up in a hotel.
Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield
Bombay smells.
Yes, I know I've written the same words every morning for the past two months, but they come from the heart. Bombay smells. It smells like no other place I've ever visited. I mean, I've lived everywhere from the slums of Avernus, where dead bodies are left to rot where they drop, to a squat above a thoat-gelding shop in the mires of Zellen VIII, but I've never come across such an all-pervading, gut-wrenching stench of decay and unwashed flesh. That's what coming home means, if Earth is really home any more. Unwashed aliens just smell exotic, and more often than not rotting alien food tastes better than it does fresh. What I'm trying to say is that even a nasty alien stink has something extraordinary about it, but sheer human squalor just turns the stomach.
Especially when I'm in a city whose people think that the function of a river is to act as a latrine upstream and a launderette downstream. I'd complain, but I'm too polite. I have to be polite. In 1887, on Earth, everybody is polite.
Well, everybody that matters.
But that's the general gripe over with. Onto the specific.
The P&O representative told me yesterday that the Matilda Briggs was due in after lunch. Today, after all the usual guff - sleeping in, being woken up by the mamlet who wanted to clean my room, dressing, having lunch - I wandered through town towards the dock. The route was lined with shops, hotels and offices designed to be impressive, in a gothic sort of way. I had to push my way through crowds of workers, soldiers, beggars, lepers, amputees, bullocks and pariah dogs before I could pass across