Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [49]
‘Tell me what you did,’ Wolff said softly.
‘I killed Gerhard. I let all those people die,’ Summerfield admitted.
‘You witnessed that, Nurse Kitzel?’
‘Yes, sir. Sir, who did she let die?’ Wolff shrugged.
‘On Smith Street,’ the prisoner answered.
‘Oh, yes, of course. I’d forgotten about them. Don’t worry, prisoner, there won’t be any need to repeat the exercise now that you’ve admitted your guilt.’ Wolff smiled.
‘Sir, shall I cut her hair?’ Kitzel asked. The prisoner gasped.
Wolff paused for dramatic effect. He looked at Summerfield, who was silently begging with him.
‘No,’ he announced finally. Summerfield was looking at him with a pitiful expression of gratitude. At this second, she would have willingly given herself to him, betrayed her own mother, reeled off a list of her contacts and fellow agents.
Summerfield would not forget what had just happened. She was his, now.
‘One small thing, prisoner. How do you know the name of the dead soldier?’
Forrester had already gone.
George Reed had spent the night on the sofa, at his insistence. Forrester expressed her disappointment, claiming that she would ‘find it impossible to get warm’. Reed recognized this as sarcasm. He remembered dreaming about Roz, but couldn’t remember the details. He had woken at a quarter to eight, and had immediately knocked on the bedroom door. There had been no response. Remembering the morning before, when Roz had been so worried about oversleeping, he had decided to open the door - an easy decision to make. The room was dark, and musky with her scent. It had been terribly anticlimatic to learn that although the bed had been slept in, it was empty now. Reed stepped over, placing his hand on the mattress. It was still warm. The flat was tiny, and it only took Reed a minute to confirm his suspicion that the kitchen and bathroom were also empty.
Roz’s bag was there. Had she forgotten it, or did this mean that she was planning to come back before she went into work? A horrible suspicion dawned on him. He unbuckled the handbag, feeling very guilty about doing so. It was fastidiously neat. Roz’s ration book, identity papers, purse and security pass were all there. Apart from that, it was empty. The photographs weren’t there.
Last night, after Kendrick had told them about von Wer the spy, Forrester had insisted that they go straight back up to their office. She had opened up the safe, taken out the aerial photographs of London and put them in her handbag.
He had pointed out that the photographs weren’t meant to leave the room, let alone the building. Roz had smiled that knowing smile of hers and pecked him on the cheek.
Now Roz had vanished and so had the photographs. The consequences if the Luftwaffe got hold of reliable information about their aerial bombardments didn’t bear thinking about.
They would know which of their targets they had and hadn’t hit. They could make a good guess which areas were adequately defended and which weren’t. They would be able to plan future raids with almost total accuracy. Kendrick was right: Forrester was not a Nazi Spy. So what was going on?
* * *
With a whirr, the double doors automatically swung shut behind Roz.
It had taken a couple of weeks of getting used to, but nowadays she took it for granted that the console room of the TARDIS was impossibly large. Roz still hadn’t worked out where the light that flooded the room came from. For a while, she had assumed that it must emanate from the large piece of machinery hanging from the ceiling over the hexagonal console.
She had mentioned this to Chris, but he had quickly proved that she was wrong. He was unable to come up with a better solution, and Roz had let the subject drop. She was still a little disconcerted by the low humming that seemed to come from all around, its pitch unchanged wherever you were in the ship. She had never had any problem with the slight vibrations generated by a good old Terran warp engine.
Roz suspected that whatever was making the noise was so advanced and alien that even if she managed