Doctor Who_ Relative Dementias - Mark Michalowski [26]
‘Weird,’ breathed Ace as Claudette came to the end of her tale and looked up at her. Her brown eyes were full of expectation.
‘So that was this mysterious Mr Sooal?’
Claudette nodded. ‘I think so – I’ve never seen him before, but I’ve heard the others talk about him.’
‘He never comes out of his room?’
‘Not often. One or two people have seen him moving about the house in the middle of the night, but Megan’s warned us that we aren’t to bother him. She says he’s a very private person.’
‘And it’s an odd name, isn’t it?’ mused Ace. ‘Sooal. Is he foreign?’
Claudette shrugged. ‘It does sound a bit, I dunno, Indian or something, doesn’t it?’ Claudette caught sight of the bedside clock. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said hastily, picking up the pile of towels.
‘Just one more thing,’ Ace said. ‘Doctor Brunner – er, my mum. Have you seen her anywhere?’
‘I saw her the other weekend when she brought your gran up
– but I’ve not been here since Thursday.’ She frowned. ‘Why?
Didn’t she come in with you?’ Claudette saw Ace’s expression.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘That’s just it,’ said Ace heavily. ‘I don’t know. She’s disappeared completely.’
The Doctor let himself into his room and stood for a moment, deep in thought.
Joyce’s room was number five. Reading the guest book upsidedown had been a piece of cake – although he felt sure that Mary had seen that he was staring at it. He laid his hat and umbrella on the bed, and slipped quietly out of the room, pulling the door dosed behind him. Room five was just along the corridor.
He peered over the banister and saw Mary’s elbow, pistolling backwards and forwards as she polished the life out of the desk.
He smiled – he could do with someone like Mary in the TARDIS.
Joyce’s door was, unsurprisingly, locked. A few seconds later he had it open, and he slipped inside.
At first, the Doctor wondered whether he’d got the right room. It looked unused. But then he remembered how tidy and formal Joyce could be. He noticed the neat collection of bottles on the glass shelf above the sink. He crossed to the dressing table, and suppressing a momentary twinge of guilt, he began opening drawers, looking for anything that might give him more clues. He really hoped that Ace’s investigations would turn up something, since he doubted he would find anything here. She’d been missing since yesterday morning, and, knowing Joyce, it seemed unlikely that she would have stayed out all night without letting someone know where she was.
A vague sense of impropriety nudged at him as he poked tentatively through the contents of the drawers. Clothes, some still with their price tags attached, a brown bottle of tablets, a couple of letters. The only thing about them that spoke to him was the precision with which they’d been laid out. Disappointed
– and vaguely unnerved by how much of his friend’s character was revealed in those few items and their layout – he slid the last drawer shut, noticing a photograph in a simple, silver frame on the bedside table. It showed Joyce and two men, presumably her husband and son, in UNIT dress uniform. On a whim, he produced a scrap of paper and a pencil from his pocket, scribbled a note, and propped it up against the frame.
The teashop, the Doctor was delighted to discover a half hour later, doubled as the post office. Which meant that not only could he get himself a decent cup of tea, but he could also find out if Joyce had bought the stamp there for her postcard to him.
It was also – as he’d hoped – the centre of the village’s gossip network. As he sipped his tea, he skipped through a paperback copy of some science fiction nonsense called T he Cassandra Experience that he’d found in his pocket. He didn’t believe a word of it – but then, that was the Cassandra Experience all over. As he scanned the book, looking for historical inaccuracies and scribbling notes in the margin, he listened to the conversations going on around him.
A young man and a woman discussed what they were going