Doctor Who_ Island of Death - Barry Letts [8]
The hill was quite steep now, and she soon found herself gasping. But when she paused for a brief moment to get her breath she heard it again, the sound of running feet, abruptly coming to a halt.
She looked despairingly around. She could see nobody to whom she could appeal for help. The only thing to do was to escape from the darkness. She turned off the track and plunged into the trees, aiming for the sanctuary of the lights.
Now she was running, running, running for all she was worth, the pounding of the following feet sounding ever nearer. Another fifteen yards... ten... five... and then the root of an aged tree caught her toe and she plunged headlong into a squashy carpet of long-dead leaves. Rolling onto her back, she automatically put up her arms to protect her face - but not before she caught a glimpse of the black shape that was her pursuer, not a dozen feet away.
And now, no longer was she Sarah Jane Smith, investigative journalist, the bright secure product of thousands of years of civilisation. Instinct took over. Even her panic retreated into a white blankness as her body crunched itself into a primeval foetal ball to await the inevitable attack.
Time vanished.
Then a shout - ‘Oi, you!’ - and the footsteps again; but now they were retreating, at speed.
Still she could not move - until a touch on her shoulder awoke the terror inside. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘Get away!’ She opened her eyes, shrinking back, her hands held out in futile defence against an attack that no longer threatened.
‘Are you all right, miss?’
She recognised him then. She’d seen him often, the old codger with the ancient bull terrier. She sat up, trying to find herself in the turmoil of feeling that came flooding back.
‘Yes... yes. I’ll be all right. Thank you...’
‘Just happened to catch sight of him in time. Best to stay in the light, you know. Shall I call the police?’
Sarah clambered to her feet, unthinkingly brushing the leaves from her skirt, the nondescript blue skirt she’d thought a Daisy Peabody might wear. ‘No point,’ she said,
‘thanks all the same. He’ll be miles away by now, whoever it was.’
Whoever it was. Or whatever it was.
‘Very gratifying, Doctor,’ said Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Taking notice of me at last! Rather overscrupulous, in fact. I can’t see that security would have been breached by your contacting UNIT earlier.’
‘Nothing to do with your precious security, Brigadier. If we’d had Detective Sergeant Plod and his friends trampling all over something as sensitive as this...! I needed the information, but the situation called for the utmost tact.’
The Doctor found it hard enough to admit even to himself that things had actually gone from bad to worse at Hampstead Heath police station.
It was when the sergeant had utterly misunderstood him to be claiming acquaintance with Sherlock Holmes that his credibility sank to absolute zero. In spite of his irritable attempts to explain that he’d actually been referring to Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle - ‘He latched onto a few little tricks of observation and deduction I showed him, you see. Said that I’d given him an idea for a short story for the Strand Magazine.‟ - he was still escorted firmly to a cell.
And when he caught the words ‘Colney Hatch’ as the detective sergeant’s voice receded down the corridor, he’d decided that enough was enough and persuaded the police to let him make a phone call. He had no intention of letting them cart him off to the local ‘loony bin’, as Sergeant Benton would no doubt have called it.
‘Sorry I couldn’t come myself,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Previous engagement. I’m sure Benton handled it very well.’
The Doctor grunted, trying to put out of his mind the image of the barely concealed grin with which Benton had greeted him as they’d unlocked his cell the night before.
‘So... what’s it all about?’
Sarah arrived at UNIT HQ as hot and bothered as a sunny but sharp September day would allow.
When she’d eventually got away from her typewriter with a scant fifteen hundred words under her belt