Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [106]
It was a long time after his death that I realised that I did not know Baker’s first name. It would have been easy to check through the police records, but I never tried. I had thought of him for so long as just ‘Baker’ that anything else would have seemed an intrusion. There was so much about him that I did not know. It didn’t matter. I had the measure of the man.
I wondered as I sat there, crouched over Baker’s body, how Catherine would react. The shock of finally killing someone herself rather than using her brother to do the dirty work might have been disturbing. When I looked up I saw that her thoughts were on something else entirely. Catherine Harries’s gaze was fixed upon the remnants of her brother’s head by the French windows. Tears streamed unheeded down her cheeks as the tongues of flame licked around the skull, blackening and cracking the bone until it looked as though it had been roughly hewn out of oak. While Susan lay unconscious on the chaise longue, Hopkinson, Catherine and I watched the flames die down and the smoke issuing from the eye sockets thin out and vanish in the pale of the approaching dawn.
Catherine’s gaze moved from the skull and travelled round the room, where the small pieces of her brother lay charred and lifeless. Eventually her wandering eyes fastened upon the arm that lay at her feet, by some ghastly chance the only complete segment of Richard Harries that existed. A sob broke through her self-control.
‘What have you done?’ she whispered. ‘Oh my God, what have you done?’ The gun wavered in her hands, the gun that had snuffed out Baker’s life. I could see Hopkinson and the Doctor tensing, ready to leap for it and bring Catherine down. Unfortunately she could feel it too. The gun swung up to cover them, then wavered unsteadily between Hopkinson, the Doctor, Fitz and me.
‘You’ll pay for this,’ she spat.
‘For what?’ asked the Doctor in a reasonable voice.
‘For killing my brother. For killing the only person I ever loved.’
‘Sergeant Baker destroyed him, Catherine. And you’ve already killed Baker.’
‘But you would have tried,’ she whispered. ‘You all wanted him dead. You hated him: all of you. Hated him enough to kill him.’
‘That’s not true,’ said the Doctor calmly. I could see what he was trying to do. Catherine Harries was too overwrought to be expected to act rationally. He was trying to calm her down by talking slowly and reasonably and attempting to engage her in a discussion. Now that she didn’t have her brother as a blunt instrument to carry out her desires it was possible that we could talk her into handing over the gun.
Barely possible…
‘You were jealous of Richard,’ she hissed. ‘All of you. You couldn’t match his intelligence so you destroyed him.’ The fire of madness burned in her eyes.
‘He destroyed himself,’ I said. ‘His experiment went wrong. You’re overwrought, Catherine. Put the gun down and we can talk about this reasonably. What do you say?’
‘You’re a fool, Inspector, if you think I’ll give you the chance to disarm me. You think I’m mad? No, for the first time I know what reality is.’ She glanced over at the Doctor, who was leaning casually against the fireplace. ‘You were right when you guessed that contact had been made between Richard and me. But you didn’t know, you couldn’t know, how beautiful it was.’
‘You might be surprised,’ the Doctor said.
‘We were in total communion. I was Richard and he was me. We knew each other in the most intimate way possible. He took me out of myself and showed me an entirely new way of looking at things.’ Her eyes transfixed me, pleading with me. ‘You can’t understand, Inspector, with your world of reports