Doctor Who_ Rip Tide - Louise Cooper [44]
before she had time to draw breath.
He had warned her, too, to stay away from the Doctor, and Nina knew he meant it. Of course, she should have remembered that secrets are hard to keep in a small community. At one point or another someone had seen her coming out of the Doctor's rented cottage; then tonight, when Steve was looking for her, one of the surfers had said she was on the beach earlier, and yet another person had just happened to notice her walking towards the cliff path with 'that older guy, the one she went to Jangos with. Oh, didn't you know about that?' That was how Steve had found them on the cliffs. He would be watching her from now on, and so would most of his friends. It was an impossible situation.
All right, then. She would have to be careful about meeting the Doctor from now on — but that needn't stop her from trying to find out where Ruth had gone to ground. Think, Nina told herself, stifling a traitorous desire to shut her eyes, forget the whole business and go to sleep. The Doctor had scanned the holiday chalets, and Ruth was definitely not there. No trace of her, either, at the old mine workings. But unless Ruth had been taking a very long walk indeed to get back to her headquarters, there simply weren't any other logical possibilities. Admittedly old mines weren't the safest of places, so that could well have put her off. And the Doctor had scanned it with that gizmo; it?' anything abnormal was there, he would have detected it.
Or would he? Something he had said once before, about signals being blocked ... Nina was no expert in mineralogy, but she did know that certain rocks and ore deposits could cause various pieces of equipment to give false readings. Iron had a strong magnetic field, for instance. Granite was faintly radioactive. Tin and copper were the main ores hereabouts, but there must be many others embedded in the ancient ground. Could they have deceived the Doctor's scanner?
Nina felt the beginnings of excitement at the possibility that she could be on to something. She wanted to talk to the Doctor, right now — but at one o'clock in the morning that wasn't a feasible idea. Tomorrow, though — early tomorrow, before anyone else was awake — she would go to the cottage. No need to set her alarm; with this in her mind she'd be lucky to sleep at all. Just a few hours, and they could find out if her
theory was right.
She pulled the duvet up over her ears and tried, though without much hope of success, to settle.
It was only a little after four, but the sky was already lightening as Nina headed through the deserted village towards the beach. She had experienced one or two midsummer dawns before going to bed, but this was the first time she had actually got up at such an hour, and the silence and cool freshness of the day's beginning were a pleasing novelty. Birds were twittering and squabbling in the trees as she hurried down the long hill, and the cries of gulls echoed up through the valley that led to the sea.
The Doctor's cottage was in darkness and all the curtains were closed. Nina knocked, waited, knocked again, but there was no response from inside. She then tried tapping at various windows and even calling as loudly as she dared through the letter box, but nothing happened. Either the Doctor was out, or — more likely — he was inside the TARDIS and had no idea that she was here. Nina considered trying to break in, but decided that it was too risky. A bedroom curtain had already twitched in the house next door; any funny business and the police would be here before she knew it.
She had two choices. She could wait for the Doctor, or she could go and take a look at the mine workings alone. It was no contest as far as she was concerned.