Doctor Who_ Atom Bomb Blues - Andrew Cartmel [49]
‘Hey man,’ said Ray. ‘Could someone open that door again. It’s a hot night and we need some breeze in here, baby.’
Outside in the night, Butcher walked swiftly, trying to raise enough of a breeze to cool himself down. He was almost back at his quarters when he realised what the Doctor had said. He had mentioned a novel of Butcher’s called Shadow Man.
But Butcher had written no such novel. He fully intended to do so, but so far the novel only existed as notes. Butcher’s heart began to hammer in his chest. He felt himself sweating in the warm night. There was only one explanation.
The Doctor had broken into his quarters and found Butcher’s notebook.
He hurried back to the prefab hut and unlocked the door. There was no trace that the door had been forced in his absence, but then a professional would leave no such trace. He left the door open behind him so that the fresh air from outside displaced the hot stale air trapped in the tin hut. He took off his shirt and poured himself a drink. There was no hurry now. He checked the lock on his desk and it showed no signs of being forced, but again that signified nothing. He took out the fat brown notebook and opened it at a 86
page marked with a braided black cotton bookmark. Here were his notes on Shadow Man. This is what the Doctor must have seen.
Then a disquieting thought occurred to Butcher. He went through the note book, checking every page. He felt the sweat gather on him again, despite the air flowing in from the night. Nowhere in the notebook had he written the title Shadow Man. He had only thought of it recently and hadn’t yet written it in the book.
He hadn’t written it anywhere. He had only thought it.
87
Chapter Seven
Into the Desert
There was the sound of weeping up at the Oppenheimer house.
Butcher had woken up that morning with a clear determination to get to the bottom of the puzzle about the Doctor. But the events of the day soon overtook him. First he had to deal with the first wave of the considerable amount of paperwork generated by the violent demise of Rosalita Gracia Cruz Tenebre, as he learned was the full name of the dead woman. That took all morning and well into the afternoon. Next he had to pay a call on Oppy. Although, of course, he’d already relayed the news of Rosalita’s death, Butcher hadn’t been up to the house in person and this was something he felt obliged to do. Oppy met him outside the house and diplomatically guided him around to the back door.
They went into the kitchen to talk. The kitchen was cool and dark, the tiles shining. Oppy told him she had washed the floor just before she had left, to take what he thought was an afternoon off work to be spent shopping.
Instead Rosalita had taken the revolver she had kept in an oil cloth under her bed (Butcher had the oil cloth along with a typed report from one of his sergeants) and gone down to the pond where she’d tried to blow Butcher’s head off.
Nevertheless, Butcher shared some of Oppenheimer’s regretful nostalgia when he spoke of the dead woman. The kitchen still smelled spicily of Rosalita’s chilli, and there was a small but genuine sense of inconsolable loss, somewhere deep in Butcher’s stomach.
The sound of weeping that echoed from the living room was clearly Kitty Oppenheimer’s response to the situation. Butcher noticed a bottle of gin, a jar of honey and a sliced lime on the kitchen table. Kitty was drinking martinis and mourning the loss of her cook. Dead drunk at four in the afternoon.
‘Incidentally,’ said Oppy, ‘I’ve given Dr Smith some time off.’
‘What?’
‘And the Doctor’s assistant Acacia and Ray Morita.’
‘Why?’
‘The Doctor is a keen amateur geologist.’
‘I’ll bet he is.’
89
Oppenheimer shook his head in amusement. ‘I understand that you have a professional obligation to be suspicious, Major, but Dr Smith has written some very highly regarded papers about fossils. And while he’s here in New Mexico he wants to examine the local geological formations. I can hardly say no to him, especially since his discussions