Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [76]
‘Here at the complex.’ Her eyes were watering. The woman was almost on the verge of tears.
‘Nowhere else?’ Benny insisted.
‘Nowhere else. Even if he was dead he would have been brought here.’ Benny’s stomach lurched. She pitched over towards the slops bucket, her nose suddenly full of the smell of disinfectant and vomit. The Doctor couldn’t be dead. The possibility didn’t exist. There had been too many times before when she’d thought he was dead and he wasn’t.
She straightened up. That wasn’t exactly logic, was it?
He hadn’t rescued her. He knew what Nazis did to their prisoners. If he was alive he would have dropped everything and come running to save her in the nick of time. Wouldn’t he? She’d learnt that the Doctor s definition of ‘a nick of time’
occasionally left a bit to be desired, but by any calculation he should have rescued her by now. She remembered the single shot, now. He’d been on the beach when there was a shot.
No burst of machine-gun fire. No Germans shouting warnings. A single shot. She hadn’t seen the Doctor since.
Kitzel handed Benny a flannel to wipe her mouth.
‘Nurse. I’m an archaeologist. On one of the first digs I went on, I discovered a great hoard of daggers. At least that’s what I thought at first. It doesn’t matter where this dig was, but the civilization we were excavating was meant to be pacifist. If these were daggers, then all previous notions of their culture would be overturned and I’d be famous. All this so early in my career. It turned out that it was just a cutlery drawer. One of the senior archaeologists took me to one side and said that there was something I had to remember, and I do, I remember the exact words: “The distinction between a dagger and an inoffensive knife blade is hard to draw and may never have been clear cut.” ’
Before Kitzel could react, Benny was holding the butter knife at her throat.
‘Now, you’re going to take me to the morgue. If we are challenged, you are going to stick up for me. If you don’t, if you even speak, I cut your throat. Understood?’
Kitzel nodded, her mouth clamped shut.
The dust still hadn’t settled when dawn came. Chris’s eyes watered as he picked his way across the rubble. Bricks and shattered glass littered the streets. It was very quiet.
Everything was dead. There was still an after-image here of the evening before, when this had been a small fishing town.
Chris had walked up this street ten hours before, when old men had been playing boules in front of the town hall. Their ghosts were still there, persisting even after their town had gone. What struck Chris was a sense of déjà vu: he had seen this scene, or one very like it, in monochrome photographs of Blitz damage. The reality was only a little more colourful than the black and white pictures and the thick fog drifting in off the sea only added to the effect. With their fronts and roofs blown away, the buildings reminded Chris of giant doll’s houses. The streets were full of debris, small fires still burning. A handful of rescue teams were toiling away. Every single window in the town had been shattered. The buildings looked like a row of people with their eyes gouged out.
Behind him, the sound of the Doctor’s crunching footsteps stopped. Chris turned. The Doctor’s expression was carefully neutral. Neither of them had slept last night.
The Doctor was still carrying the briefcase containing the stolen plans.
‘The townhouse,’ he said. Yesterday, on the way into the town, the Doctor had pointed out the same building. Chris peered through the gloom, but couldn’t see it at first. When he saw that where the townhouse had once stood there were two vast craters and a single wall, three storeys tall decorated with a patchwork of wallpaper and wood panelling.
The ground was covered in bricks, plaster and roof slates.
There wasn’t even enough to call it a ruin.
‘How could they have done this?’ Chris asked.
‘The Germans do it every night. They’ve done it to London, Southampton, Bristol, Coventry, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Hull— ’
‘But how could they? I know the Nazis