Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [134]
‘Go ahead,’ said Chris. He was carefully disassembling the guns, putting them into the little boxes stacked on one of the cabinet’s shelves. ‘It’s not like the Doctor’s going to wear them.’
Right at the back there was a white dress, carefully hung inside a plastic sheath. Like a cocktail dress. Matching white gloves and a film-noir hat, complete with veil, were attached on the outside of the bag.
‘Chris,’ I said, ‘look at this.’
It took a moment to get the dress out of the cupboard, cradling it as I unhooked the coat hanger. I laid it down on the bed next to him. He hastily shifted the oily rags he was using to clean the guns.
Chris looked at it. ‘When’s it from?’ he said.
‘The forties,’ I said. ‘The nineteen forties.’ I was rummaging in the bottom of the cupboard, among the boots. ‘Look at these.’
White high-heels.
He looked at the dress some more.
‘It’s a wedding dress, isn’t it?’
I sat down with my back to the cupboard. ‘You didn’t know about this, did you?’
Chris just shook his head. ‘I wonder when she knew about it,’
he said. ‘When she decided. She never talked about George. I thought she just left him behind.’
I don’t think we ever leave them behind, diary.
Why didn’t she ever say anything to us?
310
I’m sitting here writing, up alone in my room. The Doctor’s probably still lying on his bed, where we left him. Chris is watching sims downstairs and Jason’s doing the washing up.
Why didn’t she ever tell us? Maybe she hadn’t made up her mind whether to go back to 1941, to take George Reed up on his offer of marriage, a home, a life of relative comfort and normality. Maybe the dress was just in case. But she could have said something.
Look what she’s done to the Doctor and Chris. Did she even think about them, before running up that hill? Bear with me, I’m aware this makes no sense, diary, bear with me. What about George? What about all of us? If she could see Chris slumped in front of the 3D and the Doctor half catatonic on the guest bed and me sitting here with tears in my eyes, trying to write, would she regret her decision?
What the hell was she thinking?
Yellow stick-on note: I’m glad I got that out of my system. I still want to know, though, Roz. What were you thinking?
Kadiatu got here on Saturday.
How she found out we were here, I don’t know. Maybe Chris sent her a message, I’ll have to ask. Maybe the People found something about Roz’s death while they were paging through human history.
She descended from the sky in a bloody great fighter jet. It looked a bit old-fashioned – I reckoned I’d have to look it up in Jane’s Ostentatious Aerial Combat Vehicles.
Jason and I were in the kitchen at the time. I was washing up, peering at the Doctor, safely snoozing in his wheelchair out on the back lawn. I’d just made an especially witty comment about the Doctor becoming part of the shrubbery when the sky started to rumble, cutting across my punchline.
‘There aren’t any clouds,’ pointed out my observant husband, drying a dish.
‘That’ll be a flying saucer landing,’ I said. I headed for the back door.
‘The Institute is going to love this,’ said Jason.
311
Chris almost flattened me, careening down the stairs. He was wearing jeans and nothing else. I threw myself against the wall.
Fortunately, he stopped before he could make a large cartoon hole in the flyscreen.
We could see the ship, now, a heavy thing lowering itself on to the tennis court behind the house. I hoped it was advanced enough to have AG lifters, preferably ones which would stop its landing struts from wrecking the playing surface.
‘Triangulum Swift 400 series,’ said Chris.
‘You just made that up.’
He shook his head, yellow hair in disarray. ‘Twenty-first century.’
The flat, black triangle juddered to a halt on the tennis court.
The air around it was shimmering with heat.
Kadiatu got out of the plane. She was twenty feet above ground, but she didn’t bother with a ladder or any such frippery, she just jumped, dreadlocks trailing. She had on a white jacket, white slacks, white vest. She wore a violently