Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [7]
„I expect we are, Mr Yates,‟ replied Mrs Macau coldly, and turned into the house. „Please follow me.‟
After the brightness of the sun, the hallway seemed dingy, the walls cluttered with clocks whose sombre, somehow ominous symphony of clunks and ticks made him think of little knives chopping away the seconds. Mrs Macau asked him to sign the register, then gave him a perfunctory tour of the guesthouse: the lounge where two old ladies sat knitting, their faces rouged by the effect of the red flock wallpaper; the dining room where breakfast was served between 7.30 a.m.
and 10 a.m. precisely (she scowled as if he had already contravened this rule); the bathroom on the second floor, with black pin-mould collecting in the corners and ever-present condensation fragmenting the sunlight through the stippled glass of the window; finally, his own room on the top floor, which instantly became his favourite part of the house.
It was an attic room with a sloping ceiling, a brass-framed bed and a small window in an alcove offering a seagull‟s-eye view of the fishing harbour.
„Thank you, Mrs Macau,‟ he said, putting his suitcase on the bed. „I‟m sure I‟ll be very comfortable here.‟
She started to list the rules of the house. No alcohol. No pets. No visitors after 10 p.m. Mike listened patiently till the end and replied, „That all sounds perfectly fine, Mrs Macau.‟
With a final suspicious glance she left him alone. Mike pursed his lips and expelled a heartfelt sigh of relief, then snapped open the catches of his small suitcase and lifted the lid. Although he had been booked into the guesthouse for two nights with an option to stay longer if required, he was hoping to be back on a train to London by tomorrow afternoon, his business concluded.
Not that he would only do half a job, of course. No, Mike was too thorough, too conscientious, for that. It was simply that he expected nothing to come of this little investigation.
From his suitcase he took an army-issue toiletry bag, the latest in a series of psychology textbooks he had been reading recently (his immediate subordinate and good friend, Sergeant John Benton, had picked this one up from his desk a couple of days previously, flicked through a few pages and then replaced it with a baffled, slightly troubled expression), and a small selection of clothes, which had been meticulously ironed and folded by his own fair hands.
He put the clothes and the toiletry bag away in the chest of drawers that stood against the wall beside the door and placed the book on his bedside cabinet. The suitcase now contained only three further items - a file pertaining to his assignment in an anonymous, buff-coloured document wallet, a chunky two-way radio and a Colt .45 semi-automatic handgun in a body holster.
He felt rather foolish bringing along a gun when all he was required to do was chat to a local lighthouse keeper about a strange light he had seen come down in the sea twelve days ago, but the Brigadier had insisted, „Always be prepared, Yates,‟ he had said in that brash, rather pompous way of his.
„First rule of soldiering.‟
„I thought that was the boy scouts, sir,‟ Mike had replied with gentle good humour.
The Brigadier‟s moustache had twitched. „Same principle, Yates. You‟ve worked for UNIT long enough to know that you should always expect the unexpected.‟
Mike put the radio in the drawer beneath his underwear, placed the gun on the bedside table next to the book, tossed the document wallet on to the armchair beside the alcoved window, then closed his suitcase and slid it under the bed.
He spent the next twenty minutes reading the documentation, which didn‟t amount to much: a local police report comprising a short statement from the witness and a photocopy of the story as portrayed by the local newspaper, which treated the whole thing as a bit of a joke.
Mike sighed. Ninety-nine per cent of such incidents proved to have no basis in fact, but UNIT were obliged to follow up each and every one of them as a matter of