Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [105]
The bullet caught Baker in the back as he pulled clear of Harries, exposed. The force of the shot knocked him back at the living corpse just as a second bullet – the twin of the first – cracked into the back of his head and the burly sergeant crashed to the floor, sliding down Harries’s blackened form, his uniform as bloodied and torn as his head. Kreiner leaped aside, diving behind an armchair as Catherine’s arm swung round to cover him too.
The attack seemed to have brought Harries completely under Catherine’s influence again after his earlier hesitation and he turned to face us, his sister watching, smiling. Kreiner was for the moment forgotten. Stratford and Susan were on the chaise longue, and Catherine ignored them too. For the moment. The Doctor and I moved backwards as Harries advanced until I could feel the mantel shelf pressed coldly against my shoulder blades. There was nowhere left to go, except up the chimney again, and then Harries would merely reach up and pull us back down into the fireplace.
The Doctor turned away, searching the wall for impossible escape.
‘Hopkinson,’ he hissed and I turned to follow his gaze along the mantelpiece. To escape – perhaps.
Harries was still several paces away as I realised what the Doctor had meant. I reached out slowly, hoping not to alarm Catherine into shooting. After an age, a step of Harries’s in fact, my fingers closed on the warm base of the oil lamp, and with as fast and fluid a motion as I could achieve I gripped and hurled it.
The lamp shattered on Harries’s chest, oil spilling down his body. Catherine watched horrified, petrified, as the pool of flame spread and ran down towards the jacket pocket. Harries himself seemed not to notice the fire and lurched closer to us, his body enveloped by the yellow tongues, the remains of his mouth and hair blurring until everything was scarlet hot. His stained clothes burned easily away from his ripped torso despite the snow. The remaining skin on his face crawled away from the fire, curling back from the glistening bone beneath, the flames bubbling into his mouth and nose and eyes
There was a sizzle as the fuse caught, followed by a deafening roar as the dynamite exploded, hurling us back against the fireplace and rocking Catherine back on her heels. Harries’s right arm, complete up to the elbow, landed at her feet. It was the only recognisable part of him left intact apart from the head.
Catherine screamed, in anger as much as in fear or surprise, and the skull of her long-dead brother came to rest against the piled furniture at the window, flames licking out of the sockets that had contained his eyes, and melted flesh rolling like tears down the stripped cheekbones. Then the fire died and the skull toppled on to its side.
* * *
THE REPORT OF INSPECTOR IAN STRATFORD (23)
Baker’s death will always be with me. Time after time it replays itself in my mind, as constant and as faithful as Baker was himself. I torture myself with the thought that his death could have been avoided. If I had done this, if that had happened, then Baker might still be alive. But somewhere deep inside myself I believe that everything that happened to us was ordained by something that took no account of our free will. His death was a function of his life. If Baker had not done what he did he would still be alive, but if he had not done what he did he would not have been Baker. I can honestly say that Baker was one of the bravest and most unselfish men I have ever met. All through the affair he displayed both his rock-solid common sense and a disregard for his own life in the face of danger.
It was these things that brought him down, of course. Only he out of all of us was clear-headed enough to remember the dynamite during the struggle against Richard Harries. Only he was foolhardy enough to try using it. His reward was quick in coming. Two bullets, enough not only to kill