Doctor Who_ Remembrance of the Daleks - Ben Aaronovitch [2]
Something that surely could not be a transistor radio was dumped casually on a nearby table.
The girl approached the counter.
Mike watched as she leaned over the counter and looked around. She didn’t move like any girl he knew, and certainly she didn’t dress like anybody he had ever seen.
She banged her knuckles on the worn Formica counter.
‘Hallo,’ she called. Her accent was pure London.
The Doctor frowned at the aerial. It represented an intrusion into his plans and the implications of that worried him. He noticed a ladder giving access to the roof of the van and within moments he stood there, balanced perfectly by the aerial. One part of his mind solved a series of equations dealing with angles, displacement, and the optimum wavelength, while another part of his mind began re-examining important aspects of the plan.
The first answer came swiftly; the second cried out for more data. The Doctor sighed: sometimes intuition, even his, had limitations. Quickly sighting down the length of the aerial, he looked up... to find himself staring at the menacing Victorian bulk of Coal Hill School.
Ace banged the counter again. ‘Hallo,’ she yelled, louder than intended. ‘Service? Anybody home?’ There was no response.
‘Not like that,’ said a man’s voice.
Ace twisted round sharply to find a young man standing close to her – far too close. Ace backed off a little, gaining some space. ‘Like what, then?’
The man grinned, showing good teeth. His eyes were blue and calculating. ‘Like this,’ he said and turning to look over the counter bellowed parade-ground style:
‘Harry, customer!’ He turned back to Ace who cautiously removed her hands from her ears. ‘Like that.’
A voice answered from the back of the cafe.
‘See,’ said the man, leaning in again, ‘easy when you know how.’
A short squat man with the face of a boxer emerged from the depths of the cafe. Presumably this was Harry.
‘Give it a rest, Mike,’ he said to the younger man, who laughed and went back to his table, ‘I had enough of that in the war.’
Harry turned to Ace. ‘Can I help you miss?’
Ace considered the state of her stomach. ‘Four bacon sandwiches and a cup of coffee, please.’
The Doctor stepped carefully through the gate, dodging children who were eager to be rid of their school. Drained of its inmates Coal Hill School loomed dour as a prison over the deserted playground.
Movement caught the Doctor’s eye. The girl who had been watching Ace was there, chanting as she skipped from one chalked box to another. Around her, black circles were etched into the concrete. The four of them were in a square pattern like the pips on a die. With a quick sideways lunge the Doctor stepped close to the marks and stooped, running a finger along one of them. The finger came up black, sooty with carbonized concrete.
He looked up at the girl and for a moment their eyes met; then she whirled and was gone.
Rachel was lost in the mechanics of detection. The interior of the van was cramped with equipment, casting bulky shadows in the glow from the cathode ray tube. For a second she lost the signal in the clutter caused by the surrounding buildings, but with deft movements she refocused. There, got it, she thought. Behind her the back doors opened and the van rocked as someone climbed in.
She knew it would be Sergeant Smith.
Rachel kept her eyes on the screen. ‘You took your time.
Get on the radio and tell the group captain,’ she looked back. ‘I think I’ve located the...’
Intense grey eyes met her own.
‘Source of a magnetic fluctuation, perhaps?’ the man asked helpfully, his extraordinary eyes darting over the instruments.
She heard herself answering as if from a distance. ‘A rhythmical pulsed fluctuation, yes.’ She had the sudden bizarre impression that she was superfluous to the conversation and that the man with the odd eyes already knew the answers.
Reaching out he casually