Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [80]
‘I draw the line at second-hand underwear. Sit down.’
Kitzel fell back, the drawer buckling under her weight.
Summerfield had pulled off her uniform trousers and shrugged herself into the skirt. Kitzel glanced down at her
arm, which was prickling with goose bumps. Not just from
the cold. Summerfield leant over and patted Kitzel’s wrist.
‘I’ll have the wristwatch, please,’ she said. It was gold, an expensive present from her father on her sixteenth birthday.
Kitzel undid it, and passed it over.
‘Christ, is that the time?’ the tall woman joked as she put it on. Kitzel didn’t react.
‘Do you think I’d pass muster?’ Summerfield asked. The skirt was loose, but it was barely below her knee. The blouse fitted, just, but the jacket was pinched at the shoulders and was almost ridiculously short.
‘No,’ said Kitzel.
Summerfield laughed. At least you’re honest. When I put the coat on it won’t look quite as bad.’ Summerfield reached over for the coat and umbrella.
‘What happens now?’ Kitzel said nervously, her arms crossed over her chest. It was cold in here.
‘Now I pose as a Nazi nurse, march out of the base unchallenged and go to the docks. No guards will stop me, but I’ll get wolf-whistled. Then, I convince a fisherman to take me to the mainland. He’ll think I’m a Nazi, I’ll point out that the uniform is obviously stolen and I’ve got two black eyes. I’ll say that if he takes me I’ll give him this wristwatch. He’ll agree. I’ll cross the Channel in his fishing boat, which will take about seven hours. I’ll use that time to catch up on my sleep. I’ll arrive in Dover at,’ she checked the watch, ‘about two-thirty this afternoon. Then I’ll catch the 14.57 to Waterloo, I’ll catch the tube and meet up with my friends at Portland Street. One final question, before I go: do you think these drawers are airtight?’
Before she could react, Summerfield’s palm had shoved against Kitzel’s shoulder, pushing her flat on her back. With her knee, Summerfield slammed the drawer shut. Kitzel felt herself slide backwards, watched the crack of light at her feet vanish and gasped for breath. She was facing the wrong way, there wasn’t enough room to turn around. It was dark and cold. Was any air getting in? There wasn’t a chink of light from the opening. If she screamed would she just use up her air? She heard the key turn in the lock of the drawer. A moment later, the door to the morgue slammed shut. She kicked out at the drawer door, but it didn’t budge. Kitzel screamed.
‘I can’t believe that you’re talking to him,’ Chris said stubbornly. The Doctor checked that Steinmann was out of earshot. He was twenty yards away, busy talking to one of the survivors who had been pulled from the rubble.
‘Would you prefer me to shoot him?’ the Doctor asked quietly.
‘Yes.’
The Doctor gave one of his sad, flickering smiles. ‘What if I told you that Generalleutnant Oskar Steinmann was one of twenty-three Nazis tried at Nuremburg at the end of the war?’
‘I’d say he was a war criminal.’ To his credit, though, Chris paused. ‘But I admit that if we were to kill him now we’d alter established history. What was his sentence?’
‘Life imprisonment. He was released on medical grounds in 1969. He died in 1972, at the age of eighty-nine. A very nasty form of spine cancer.’ The Doctor looked at the fifty-eight-yearold man standing a stone’s throw from him, a man in the prime of his life.
Chris grunted approvingly. ‘Well, at least the British won in the end.’
‘Did they? I’ve seen a future in which the Nazis did, a future that wasn’t all that different. Ten years from now a swastika flew over the Festival of Britain instead of a Union Flag. The king was called Edward,