Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [68]
‘Ah,’ said Hanstrum. ‘Princess Leia.’
‘Pardon?’ spluttered Anji.
‘Princess Leia. She belongs to Antarctica.’
‘So we’re probably close,’ said Xernic. ‘Unless she’s abandoned it.’
Hanstrum shook his head. ‘No, she loves that thing.’
‘It’s ticking,’ said Anji.
‘Well, it is a crocodile,’ said Xernic. ‘It’s got an alarm clock inside it. All Earth crocodiles have. Didn’t you know that?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Anji, giving him a look. She picked up the velvet coat that Xernic had dropped to one side. ‘The poster-Fitz was wearing a jacket like this,’
she said. ‘Do you think it could be his?’
‘Possible,’ said Hanstrum.
‘Well, are there such things as tracker crocodiles?’ Anji asked. ‘Could we get, er, Princess Leia here to sniff Fitz’s coat and hunt him out?’
‘It seems unlikely,’ said Hanstrum with a sneer.
‘But it’s worth a try,’ said Xernic, encouragingly. ‘Or maybe she’ll be able to find Antarctica, if she’s her pet.’
‘It is worth a try,’ agreed Anji. ‘So we’ll try it.’ She scooped up the little ticking creature, taking care to point the teeth-end away from her – although surprisingly, it didn’t seem to be aggressive at all. It seemed quite happy to be sitting in her arms. But once they’d left the room and were at the top of the stairs, the reptile began to squirm, trying to get down. Anji hurriedly dropped it on to the floor and it began to scamper forward, inasmuch as its tiny legs could scamper.
‘I think it’s working!’ Anji cried. They followed the animal as it hurried through the backstage area, and went behind another curtain. They found themselves in a dark corridor, which the crocodile continued to run down.
Hanstrum was ridiculing the whole situation. ‘She’s probably just seizing the chance for some exercise,’ he said. ‘We’ll find ourselves in a swimming pool or something.’ Anji and Xernic ignored him.
124
EarthWorld
There was a door at the end of the corridor; Princess Leia obviously was keen to go through, so Anji opened it.
She found herself in a strange parody of a boxing arena. There was an actual ring in the centre, roped off, and seats round the outside. Princess Leia had trotted over near to the boxing ring, and was examining the floor. Anji went over to see what she was sniffing at. ‘Blood!’ she said.
Xernic had climbed up to look inside the ring, and called, ‘There’s lots more here. A huge pool of it. Do you think it’s Fitz’s?’
‘No!’ said Anji. It wasn’t going to be Fitz’s. She wasn’t going to lose anyone else, even someone she barely knew and didn’t like that much. ‘Anyway, now we know what Princess Leia was tracking. She wasn’t homing in on anyone after all, she just smelled the blood.’ She didn’t look at Hanstrum as she said that, she didn’t want to see the ‘I told you so’ expression she was sure he’d be wearing.
‘It looks like the body’s been dragged away,’ Hanstrum said, adding, ‘whoever it was.’ There was a clear trail on the floor, from the ring where Xernic was, via the traces Princess Leia was smelling, all the way out through a door on the other side of the room.
‘Then that’s where we’ll go,’ said Anji. She bent down and called to Princess Leia, but it seemed that having found the source of the smells, the little crocodile wasn’t very keen on budging, so in the end they left her there and set off following the blood trail on their own.
‘I’m the President of this world,’ Hoover was saying to the Doctor. ‘I can’t just. . .
wander off on my own.’
‘Then bring some guards with you. Do whatever you like. Only don’t try to stop me, because I am going to find Anji, because I believe she is out there with a murderer. And considering everything else she’s been through in the last few days, I think she deserves to be rescued.’ The Doctor was striding through the palace corridors, ignoring the startled guards who jumped to attention as their ruler passed by.
Hoover’s voice was