Doctor Who_ Last of the Gaderene - Mark Gatiss [3]
There had been the splendid air show to celebrate the coronation. And then the dramatic rescue which he’d coordinated in person, sending cargo planes to the aid of a stricken tanker off the coast. When was that? ’64? ’65?
Tyrell sighed and ran his finger over the big oak desk in the control room. It left a broad, brown streak in the dust. He looked around the room he’d known so well. The panoramic window, stained and partially boarded up; the radar monitors, the model Wellington bomber. He picked this up and clutched it to his chest. He’d saved it until the very end because it meant the most to him.
Always a churchgoer, a line from his favourite hymn came back to him and ran round and round his head like looped tape:
‘Change and decay in all around I see...’
He squinted as he peered through the great, curved window. The sunlight coming through it created a wide prism on the old carpet.
There was someone out there, walking swiftly across the broken tarmac of the airstrip.
Tyrell frowned. This was odd. And not a little annoying.
He’d taken great pains to see that his final day in the job would leave him alone with his beloved old aerodrome. The one thing he didn’t want before he closed the gates for the last time was to send some vandal off the premises with a flea in their ear.
With a grumpy sigh, he headed for the door, then stopped dead.
There were footsteps coming up the staircase outside.
Whoever it was, they had the audacity to come straight to him.
Unless it was an urgent message, of course. Perhaps his wife was ill. She’d taken the closure of the aerodrome almost as badly as he had.
Suddenly concerned, Tyrell stretched out his hand towards the doorknob.
The door opened before he could reach it.
Jobey was sad to see the old place go. Everyone was sad, naturally.
He stepped over his tool bag and peered through the diamond-shaped mesh of the fence.
The airstrip stretched ahead, broken and weed-strewn now, with grey parabolic prefabs on either side. Fringed by long grass, with the great control tower just to one side, it wobbled dizzyingly in the heat haze.
He could still imagine the place as it had once been, crowded with aircraft, their engines thrumming with power; knots of young flyers in buff leather sitting around in canvas chairs, waiting for the call to scramble...
Jobey shook his head. Those days were gone. And he wasn’t paid to stand about idling.
Somewhere, not too far away, there was the sound of someone shouting.
Jobey tensed, but the sound cut off.
Despite the heat, he shivered and bent down to pick up his old navy-blue tool bag. He would stop off at the pub for a swift half, he decided, just to reassure himself that everything else was just as it should be. Adjusting his straw hat, Jobey straightened up and sniffed, then set off towards the village, hobnail boots ringing off the road. He could hear the quiet chirrup of crickets in the grass, the lazy drone of a fat bumblebee as it bounced from flower to flower.
Away towards the horizon, there was a sudden flash of white. Jobey blinked and could see it quite clearly, imprinted on his retina. Summer lightning, he thought, and waited for the accompanying rumble of thunder. None came.
Jobey shrugged off his nostalgic mood and smiled broadly.
It was a good day to be alive, even if he was alone on this old, parched lane.
Jobey was not quite alone, however. He met someone on the road. Someone who shouldn’t have been there. Someone with dark eyes and a wide, wide smile. Jobey’s shriek of terror shattered the calm of the summer afternoon but no one heard it over the melancholy cries of the curlews.
Jo Grant gave a little yelp as a dark shadow passed in front of her. She had expected to remain undisturbed, stretched out on a gaudily patterned sun lounger up on the flat roof of one of UNIT HQ’s outbuildings and trying desperately to top up her tan. Her week’s leave had been depressingly short of sunshine and she’d spent most of it reading three-day-old newspapers eulogising Britain’s record heatwave.
Small and very pretty,