Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [55]
No, let’s not show off. Better keep things simple.
There was a door at the side of the house, with a glass panel set into the wood. Sarah tried to peer in through the net curtains, hoping nobody would peer out. The kitchen entrance, she decided.
She tried the handle.
The door opened.
That surprised her, really. Of course, if there were people in, as K9 had suspected, there was no reason for the door to be locked. But Sarah had been banking on the dog being wrong about that. Who was going to be here? Friends of Sam’s? Family even?
Surely not. The Doctor wouldn’t have chosen her as a companion if she’d had family. Close family, anyway. He didn’t work like that, did he? Even Batman only hired orphans as sidekicks.
Once Sarah had come back from the meeting with Coldicott, K9 hadn’t had much trouble getting the address. Sarah had found out exactly what she’d wanted from her contact: Sam’s surname. That was all she’d needed. Once she had that, K9 had been able to hack into the UN’s records, and pull out all the appropriate files. He could have done the same job even without the surname, of course, but there was so much junk in the UN files that the process could have taken forever.
Sam Jones. Security clearance Netzach (the same, Sarah had noted, as her own). Known connection to the alien element code‐named Hanged Man. Address…
Right here. In Shoreditch.
Sarah crossed the kitchen floor, as quietly as she could. She’d changed into something sensible, taken off her wig, and strapped some decent trainers to her feet, so she wasn’t going to have any more trouble with the heels. The kitchen was as ordinary as the outside of the house: white tiles, an official 1996 Greenpeace calendar on the far wall, a threadbare dog basket stuffed under the pretend‐pine table. Sarah frowned at the room as she passed through it, and the room sulked back. You would have expected more, she thought, from someone who hung around with the Doctor and got on the nerves of the United Nations. It was all so drab.
Then again, her own kitchen was hardly fascinating, was it? A Private Eye cartoon about Martians stuck to the memo board, and an old ET clock by the sink, but other than that, nothing even slightly nonterrestrial. Clearly, you couldn’t tell someone who’d spent a good chunk of her life travelling through time and space just by looking at the way she arranged her cooking utensils.
Sarah stepped through the doorway on the other side of the kitchen, poking her head around the frame first, to make sure nobody was in the hallway. Nobody was. There was the front door, the telephone, the stairs up to the next level…
And there were voices. Sarah listened. Yes: from the door at the far end of the hall. There was a warped‐glass panel in the door, yellow electrical light shining through from the other side. Low voices, very low. Maybe a television.
Who, though? Who was watching it? Sam had looked like someone in her early twenties, so maybe she was living in student accommodation. When she wasn’t off in the TARDIS, anyway. If there were other people in the house, they could have been her friends. A boyfriend, even. God, that’d be embarrassing.
When Sarah had come up with the idea of searching this place, it’d been in the hope of tracking down the Doctor. Sam hadn’t known where he’d gone, but then again she hadn’t been able to tell Sarah everything, not with the Remote listening. And the girl had known things about the Remote, too. She could have been guessing, of course, but she’d sounded pretty sure of herself. Sarah had tried to remember everything that had happened on Dust, but her memory was still a bit of a blur for some reason.
So, she had no idea what she was looking for here in the house. It was hugely unlikely that Sam would keep anything as handy as a notebook. Or an address book.
Or a phone book?
Sarah turned