Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [68]
By the time Scarlette and Lisa-Beth arrived on the fetid street, their quarry was some way ahead of them, turning into the gaudily-painted door of M. Brillot’s establishment. Shortly thereafter, Brillot himself – a plump, bald man who constantly carried a cleaver in one hand as if it were a sign of his masculinity – came running out on to the street, somewhat damaging his macho reputation by shouting that most French of exclamations, ‘à l’assassine!’. It took the London women some moments to squeeze through the gathering crowd, and some moments more for them to slip past Brillot, who was convinced that they were ghouls intent on pillaging at the crime scene.
Scarlette was first into the boucherie, but only by moments, so it’s hard to explain the discrepancies between her account and Lisa-Beth’s. According to Lisa-Beth, when they entered the shop it was clear that they were too late. The shop was dimly-lit and stank of blood, hung with the hides of butchered animals, but there were no human beings to be seen. No live human beings, at least. For the man they’d come to save, still in his English waistcoat and breeches, was already dead on a cutting-board. His head had been removed, by the cleaver which now lay at the side of his body. As Lisa-Beth describes the scene, the victim’s expression was one of quiet bewilderment, as if the head had been severed so quickly that he’d had no idea what to make of it.
But Scarlette tells a different tale. Though she too relates that the body was on the board, she claims that as they entered the man’s assailant was still standing over the corpse. Her story puts great store in the fact that the murderess whirled around to face her, and that just for a moment Scarlette looked into the angry, wrinkle-nosed face of a young Polynesian woman, whose strands of hair were plaited and who wore some form of monastic cloak which covered most of her body.
The end of the story is typical of Scarlette’s effective-but‐theatrical style. The assassine turned away from Scarlette, and Scarlette believed the girl was about to run. But then…
…I heard her growl a single world [sic] beneath her breath. She ran, yet I did not and could not see the direction in which she ran, save to say that there was no exit from the shop in that direction.
There does seem to have been an exit at the rear of M. Brillot’s shop, through which the girl could have made her escape. Yet Scarlette’s account makes it sound as though the killer simply vanished into thin air, or through a solid wall. Doubly curious, then, that Lisa-Beth mentions seeing no such assailant. Then again, perhaps due to the pleading of the British ambassador, there’s little record of the death at all.
It might sound like a terrible joke on Tula Lui’s part, to have slaughtered a man in the style of an animal. But the Mayakai were always a deeply ritualised people. Those of the Masonic tradition expected to be executed by hanging below a bridge, and on the Thames that was how it had been. Perhaps Tula Lui simply killed according to what seemed most correct at the place of execution. Perhaps she saw the remains of the animal carcasses around her in the boucherie, and believed that this was how any killing should be done when in France.
Things and people vanishing off the face of the Earth or mysteriously appearing are common themes in the narrative. The assassin in the boucherie; Sabbath’s warship (later to be named, with the usual irony, the Jonah); Fitz and Anji on May Day. The Doctor was definitely convinced that he could force solid objects to appear at will. From mid-June, new diagrams begin to appear in his yellowed, arcane notes. Until June there are a few anatomical drawings, but mostly mechanical designs, machines that seem to have no practical value at all. After June there are illustrations that look suspiciously like maps, with contours in coloured inks, just like the great chart on board Sabbath’s warship.
The Doctor wished to bring his