Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [62]
As he drove along the flyover, the buildings began getting taller. He wasn’t heading into the city centre, with its brightly lit concrete shopping areas and office blocks, or the new canal development, where the old warehouses and mills had been converted into smart new flats and all-night cafes and clubs and multiscreen cinemas.
He came off the flyover just before either of those.
The buildings here were falling into ruin, even though they were barely older than Miranda. The skyline was dominated by grey tower blocks that looked like all the Coronation Street terraces they had replaced piled up on top of each other and covered in pebble-dashed concrete. It was difficult to believe that anyone had thought this was the best solution to urban overcrowding – unless it had been designed to drive people away from the city. It was almost deserted here, even at eight in the evening. Thick metal shutters over every shop window, nothing but piles of litter to suggest anyone had been here recently. There were a few people, huddling like moths around the warm light of the takeaways and the taxi offices.
His car passed a couple of men pushing each other around on the pavement. The Doctor couldn’t tell if they were playing around, or really starting a fight. He was itching to intervene, but remembered that he was here for Debbie, and drove past.
Why had Sallak come here? Perhaps he had made local contacts while he was in prison. Perhaps he had come to a place where crime was commonplace and there was little in the way of police presence.
The Doctor didn’t need to check the address: the Tower stood out, a monolithic structure in the middle of a building site that was gradually becoming a garden for weeds and grasses. The ground was dark, deserted. There were no street lights, no source of light for a hundred yards.
There was a road encircling the waste ground, and the Doctor drove the Trabant all the way around it to get a better idea of the lie of the land. There were lights on at the top of the tower. Thirty or forty storeys up, it was difficult to be more precise.
That was where Sallak was keeping Debbie.
The Deputy would have a commanding view. If he had binoculars – and the Doctor didn’t doubt that he would – he could very well already have seen the Trabant and recognised it from their last encounter.
The Doctor found a well-lit street to park in – not that there was much danger of anyone stealing a Trabant. He stowed the earphone in the boot, took his briefcase out and locked the car. He started heading for the Tower, hoping he’d come up with some sort of strategy en route.
It was as though a patch of an alien planet had been imposed on the city. All around the edges of the wasteland life went on as normal: late buses, street lamps, sloping roofs. But here was a no-man’s-land of burned-out garages and sheds, overgrown paths and bare trees that had failed to bud this spring.
And, overshadowing it all, the Tower itself.
The Doctor picked his way across the ground. It was dark, but also quite open. He could hear things scrabbling around twenty feet to his left: dogs, perhaps even foxes. On the other side of the Tower there was a small campfire. Children, intravenous drug users, the homeless or perhaps a combination of the three. He could hear them talking, laughing, trying to sound tough.
But no one approached him and there was no sign of activity from the Tower.
The Deputy wanted him dead, the Doctor had no doubt about that. But most of all he wanted to watch the Doctor die – and seeing it through the sights of a sniper’s rifle wouldn’t satisfy that desire.
The Doctor had reached the base of the Tower. The first four floors were all boarded up. ‘Condemned’ notices were plastered all over the place. The place smelled of urine and ash.
There was movement inside.
The Doctor ducked out of sight, hiding behind a burned-out car.
At first the Doctor didn’t think it was human. It was humanoid, dressed in matt black that