Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [101]
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THE REPORT OF INSPECTOR IAN STRATFORD (22)
Like a leaf drifting downstream I drifted in and out of consciousness, and my dreams were populated by people I thought long forgotten, and others I would rather not have remembered. Places and times far distant from each other shared space in my mind. For a while I relived the last scene with my wife. I was making a fool of myself, begging her to leave her lover and come back to me. She in turn was regretful but implacable. And in the corner of our London parlour sat my aunt, although her gout had always prevented her from leaving Three Sisters.
‘It’ll end in tears,’ she kept repeating like a budgerigar, ‘it’ll end in tears…’ And so it did. I ran out into the street with the tears streaming down my face. Somehow the street outside my house was the street outside Great Scotland Yard, although I lived many miles away. The building had been stripped of its frontage, and the offices behind were revealed like a stack of little boxes furnished with filing cabinets and flimsy desks. The road was littered with dead bodies, either whole or in pieces, and rats scuttled to and fro through the human wreckage. For a while I wandered along the pavement looking for someone, although I didn’t know who. I suspect I was looking for my own body. I never found it. Instead I wandered across the road to a nearby public house.
‘Good for business,’ said the barman.
‘What is?’
‘The bomb blast. Good for business, There’s nothing like wholesale slaughter to pull in the crowds.’
I looked closer, and saw with little surprise that the barman was Chief Inspector Driscoll. He placed a foaming tankard of porter on the bar before me. ‘Drink up, laddie. It’s good for your health.’
‘Whose bomb was it?’ I asked.
‘Anarchists. Anarchists and radicals. Anarchists, radicals and the Irish. Anarchists, radicals… He seemed content to list the perpetrators to eternity, so I got up and made my leave. My attention was caught by the mirror above the bar. Beneath the fly-specked glass I could make out my own image; but there was something strange about it. My face was white and waxen, almost as if…
I raised my hands to my face. The skin was warm and clammy, and seemed oddly loose in my hands. I felt further. There was a ridge of flesh beneath my ears. I wriggled my fingers underneath and pulled.
My face came away in my hands. It was a soft fleshy mask and I stared down at it in skin-crawling disgust as I turned it over in my hands. Then I raised my eyes to the mirror again.
A skull looked back at me with dull empty holes for eyes. My skull. The skull beneath the skin. I had peeled my own face off.
I awoke screaming, struggling, clawing my way out of nightmare.
Fitz and Baker broke off from talking. ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said Baker. ‘I’m still here.’
‘What’s the time?’
‘Don’t rightly know, sir. Past midnight at any rate. Well past midnight.’
‘Any movement?’
‘Difficult to say. I think Professor Harries went off after Mr Hopkinson and the Doctor. Miss Harries spends most of her time in the hall making sure that nobody can escape from here. Then again, any time I consider going to the window I can hear her moving around outside. Or it might be Harries himself. That’s the problem, sit There’s no way of telling.’
‘And Sus– Miss Seymour?’
‘Resting, sir. Her ankle took a hell of a bang falling from that window. How are you feeling, sir?’
‘I think I’m all right now. I feel rather weak, but the fever appears to have passed off.’ Indeed my head felt much clearer than it had for some time. My shoulder ached and my stomach still churned but I felt that the periods of unconsciousness had ceased. I made an effort to stand up.
‘Are you sure that’s wise, sir?’
‘I’ll have to get up sometime, Baker. Better now than in an emergency.’
‘All the same, sir…’
‘You’re not my aunt, Baker.’
‘For which I am sure she and I are truly grateful, sir.’
I walked unsteadily over to the door. My stomach lurched a couple of times but decided to remain where it was. There was an odd sort of tingling in my joints but I felt