Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [10]
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
these people with no pasts, didn’t they have friends or jobs?’
Harris sighed – he’d told this story before. ‘Each of them was stepping out with someone. We spoke to the coloured girl’s fiancé–’
The Doctor stood up from his work, a pained expression on his face. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers, unintentionally leaving a smear of the dead boy’s blood behind as he did so. ‘Didn’t she have a name, Chief Inspector?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Harris said, transfixed by the scarlet stain on the Doctor’s forehead.
‘The poor woman is dead. The least we can do is respect her memory by using her name when we talk of her. Hmm?’
Harris shrugged. ‘As you like, Doctor, as you like. Her name was Mary.
Mary Ridgeway. I spoke to her fiancé. Eight weeks they’d been stepping out together, and yet he didn’t know more than her name and address. He’d never met any of her friends. She’d apparently never mentioned her family, either here or back home. And it wasn’t just the boyfriend; the factory where she worked hadn’t taken any references because of the casual nature of the work.
Immigration had never heard of her. As far as anyone could tell she had just dropped out of the sky. Except of course, that’s impossible, isn’t it?’ Harris added, rhetorically.
‘Is it?’ the Doctor asked, as if genuinely considering the possibility.
‘Yes. I think so. Don’t you?’
Eyes twinkling, the Doctor replied, ‘I should think it highly improbable, to say the least. What about the others? Are their life histories just as elusive?’
‘Six people have been murdered and not one of them had so much as a post office savings account to their name. It started in the summer when a pensioner was found lying in the gutter on Gerrard Street. Apparently, she’d been walking home from the pictures with her new husband, another geri-atric. He’d stepped into a pub for a packet of Players and come out to find her face down in the drain. Thought she’d had a heart attack, until he turned her over and caught sight of all the blood.’
‘He must have known more about her, if they were married?’
Harris shook his head. ‘Theirs was a whirlwind romance. They’d only met six weeks before she was killed. The old boy knew no more about her than the others. He turned out to be quite a well-known painter in his day, although apparently his particular style had fallen out of favour with the critics and he hadn’t sold anything for years. The two of them lived quietly in a basement flat in Fitzrovia. Eccentric, but harmless.’
Harris watched the Doctor finish his examination of the dead boy. The little man tossed his surgical robes carelessly on to a bench and Harris followed 17
him into the washroom. There he watched as the Doctor vigorously scrubbed the blood off his hands.
The chief inspector took the opportunity to study the man who had appeared from beneath the pathologist’s anonymous mask and gown. The Doctor’s face moved through several, contortions as he worked at the pink stain on his hands. His was a face which never sat still, as if it were expressing a flowing river of colourful thoughts and ideas. He was quite unlike any pathologist that Harris had encountered before.
‘Do you know what I would do if I were you, Chief Inspector?’ the Doctor said cheerfully, as he dried his hands.
Harris had no idea.
‘I’d start looking for a connection between the victims’ lovers,’ the Doctor continued, as he struggled into a tweed jacket before plonking a battered fedora upon his head. ‘A place where they all go, perhaps socially. Or where they have been in their recent past. I should be very interested to visit a place where one might meet a person who has no past. Sounds liberating, don’t you think?’
Harris considered this. He didn’t like the idea of a place like that at all.
‘Perhaps you’d like to help us find this place. Assist us, informally of course, with the inquiry?’
‘Chief Inspector,’ the Doctor