Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [42]
Through her complaints and grumbles, she was soon divulging all manner of secrets about the house: doors that were always locked; the master, Mr Smith, who was an invalid recluse and whom she had never met; guests who arrived, but who she never saw depart, even if they sometimes left their baggage behind. Most of this she did not understand, but she recognized the place’s unsavoury nature all right. There were blocks on her mind of course, just like all the other humans in the house; Josiah was not risking interference from a group of local peasants.
Fortunately, Mrs Grose knew her place and refrained from pestering the Doctor with too many questions. He persuaded her to put the exhausted Ace to bed upstairs while he tried to get on with some of his other more pressing tasks.
Of all these, the task he was most to regret was the waking quite so early of Josiah’s specimen of a Victorian police inspector. It took about ten minutes to rouse Inspector Alfred Mackenzie of Scotland Yard from the static trance in which he had been preserved, catalogued and consigned to a display drawer.
The Doctor’s initial misgivings came when Mackenzie opened his twinkling blue eyes for the first time, smoothed his handle-bar moustache and said, ‘And you are... ?’ The inspector was completely unaware of his fate and was mainly concerned with the unaccountable pangs of hunger with which he was wracked.
It was useless trying to explain recent events in the house to Mackenzie. His straightforward mind needed solid facts, but at Gabriel Chase the solid facts would overwhelm his sanity altogether.
‘Typical humans!’ muttered the Doctor. ‘If they don’t understand it, they block it out completely. No wonder Josiah has it so easy.’
He decided there and then not to talk to himself out loud, because Mackenzie had already produced a notebook and was licking the tip of a pencil.
As far as the inspector was concerned, it was two years ago and he had just arrived at Gabriel Chase to start his investigation. Sir George Pritchard, the owner of the house, had disappeared in curious circumstances and his wife, Lady Margaret, had summoned the police. Mackenzie had been speaking to her, but she had also vanished. The next thing he knew this strange Doctor had appeared from nowhere and taken over the running of the house.
Mackenzie began to suspect the foulest of play. There was no body yet, but he was quick to add the Doctor to his list of suspects for that eventuality. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery before some half-baked private sleuth arrived, he decided to continue his inquiry in the kitchen where, in all likelihood, there might be the chance of a meal.
This allowed the Doctor to complete several tricky tasks that he wanted kept secret for the moment. Even indoors, the warmth and sunshine of a tranquil day in late summer were enough to dull the sinister threat of the house at night. From the second floor of the house, the view across the countryside presented a pastoral paradise. The harvest had been collected weeks ago and despite the heat, the trees were showing the first golden hints of autumn. Beyond the parkland, the fields swept south, down to the River Brent and west across to Horsenden Hill. Perivale, Greenford Parva or Pear Tree Valley, whatever it was called; the Doctor was depressed to imagine how this rural idyll would, within a hundred years, be swamped by the faceless world of housing estates that Ace would be born into.
But the darkness had to be confronted. The Control creature would not stay entombed in the stone spaceship for ever, and the Doctor could guess why the door to the upper observatory was locked. The menace both within and beneath the house had not been stilled; its secrets tantalized the Doctor, just as the whole universe played havoc with his curiosity. He had to know the answers.
Of his set tasks, only one had eluded the Doctor.
Nimrod still lay unconscious on the couch in the drawing room. Thank goodness Mrs Grose had not wanted to clean in there. Between other jobs, the Doctor had made repeated