Doctor Who_ Psi-Ence Fiction - Chris Boucher [58]
'I didn't say anything about writing it off,' Simpson said. 'Whoever this Joan Cox was, her death deserves a proper professional investigation. Of course it does. But not as a murder, Martin. That SOCO's got it right. It's straight up and down, this one is.'
'As long as we haven't made up our minds about it,' Bartok said.
Simpson shook his head. 'I've always been a sucker for the locked door mystery.'
The Doctor was bored with walking. Sometimes it did help him to think but since there was nothing he particularly wanted to think about at the moment, walking was simply an inefficient way of getting from one place to another. He had considered trying to get a lift to the university, but for the life of him he couldn't remember the accepted signal for: if you have room to spare and are going in my direction I should be grateful to ride with you in your vehicle.
When he had walked a bit further and got a bit more bored, however, he decided to experiment with possible gestures. He had tried raising his right hand palm upwards, his left hand palm upwards, both hands palms upwards, both hands palms downwards, one upwards one downwards first right then left; he had tried raising his hat; he had tried standing on one leg and waggling his foot; he had tried raising his hat while standing on one leg and waggling his foot. In return he had been waved at, hooted at, laughed at, and there had been a couple of hand gestures which he couldn't interpret but which he felt were not kindly meant.
It was obvious to him that he had not yet come close to the correct signal and he was almost as bored with trying as he was with walking. He would have persevered though if it had not been for the appearance of the police cars.
The first of them roared past with sirens blaring and lights flashing, and it looked to the Doctor as if it might be heading in the direction of the university. Wherever it was they were going he did not relish the idea of being picked up by them, so he paused in his experimental gesturing.
Then a second police car roared past and in it he thought he caught sight of the two detectives who had questioned him. Could it have been Detective Constable Bartok and
Detective Sergeant Simpson again or was it just an illusion, a paranoid flashback? When he heard the cars coming and saw, if he did see them, those two policemen it had occurred to him that they might have changed their minds about letting him go. All that activity might be about recapturing him. It was an irrational thought, an arrogant idea. What possible interest could they have in him? He must try to remember, he reminded himself, what the dangers of the field effect from a multiverse overlap or a space-time loop anomaly or a self-regulating temporal inversion could be. Mild paranoia was only one of many problems
faced by the vulnerable mind. Not that his was a vulnerable mind of course.
And the longer the susceptible spent within the field, and the closer they got to its cause and focal point, the more dangers they were in. Nor was he one of the susceptible either. He had not even positively identified such a field effect in operation let alone pinpointed its focus, but if it was there and the parapsychology experiments were feeding into it something very unpleasant could be happening. Or it could still be the water. There was something more than a little peculiar about the water.
When a third police car howled and flashed past, the Doctor decided to abandon the idea of getting a lift and to leave the road altogether. He clambered over the first field gate he reached and set out across the rough pasture land in the general direction of the university. The police sirens were fading into the distance and he could not tell whether that was where they too were heading.
'Every last one of them comes screaming in with the blues and twos going.'
The security supervisor remained standing behind his desk as he glared at Simpson. 'You'd think it was a bank blag going down. I mean we were looking for a bit of