Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [14]
‘Like soldiers marching, do you mean?’ I hazarded.
Harries looked up, startled, and I saw that he had indeed forgotten that I was there. ‘Yes, exactly,’ he replied after a moment. ‘If they fail to break step on a bridge, the reinforcement of the vibrations could cause it to fall down.’
‘Could the brain fall down too, like the walls of Jericho?’
Harries ignored this; or perhaps he did not hear it. ‘The output from the brain is then overlaid on to a basic sine carrier wave of one cycle per second applied to a second brain. Thus the modulations corresponding to the thoughts of one can be induced in the other.’
‘And what does that mean?’
Harries reached into the maze and shied the rat away from one turning and towards another. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said and lifted the rat back to its starting point. Then he guided it through, pushing it from one doorway to another and encouraging it along the passageways until he had brought it to the opening. He picked it up and held it for a moment.
‘Of course,’ he spoke as if to the rat, ‘the brains have to be biologically similar to begin with.’
He took the first rat from the cage again and replaced it with the one he had guided through the puzzle. ‘These rats are from the same litter,’ he said, returning the first to its prison in the centre of the maze.
At first I thought it was by chance that the rat made straight for the right opening off the square, but as it continued along the path towards the way out – the path that the same rat had just now failed to find despite several minutes’ exploration – scrambling ever faster and making not a single wrong turn, all without hesitation, I knew as surely as it did that chance was not a factor here. It was as if this rat had been guided through also, and remembered the route exactly.
I looked up and saw that Harries’s eyes were fixed on me now; he knew what the rat was doing.
‘Thought transference,’ he whispered, and without looking caught the rat as it hurtled out of the maze. He returned it to its companion and there was a knock at the door.
It was Simpson.
‘Miss Harries and Miss Seymour have arrived, sir,’ he told us. ‘I thought you should be informed.’
‘Thank you,’ said Harries abruptly and strode from the room, brushing past Simpson as the butler moved to retrieve the lunch Harries had ignored.
‘I’ll just remove this, sir,’ said Simpson as he carried the tray out, but I barely heard him.
I was staring at the rats, sitting quietly now in their cage. From the same litter, I reminded myself; and as Harries greeted his sister I had my first intimation of what he intended…
* * *
THE REPORT OF INSPECTOR IAN STRATFORD (2)
It was lunchtime when I finally arrived at a snowbound Scotland Yard. I spent a few minutes writing up my fruitless interview, but broke off when I felt someone standing behind me. I turned. It was Chief Inspector Driscoll.
‘You’ve an aunt in Three Sisters, haven’t you, Stratford?’ he snapped. I paused, wondering why he was asking.
‘Well?’ he demanded, his tiny moustache twitching impatiently.
I nodded, then hastily added, ‘Yes, sir, I occasionally stay with her when I’m on a walking holiday.’
‘Thought so,’ he said with a brief triumphant smile. Driscoll prided himself on knowing everything about his men down to the last insignificant detail. He took pleasure in parading his collection of trivia, recalling things that might have been mentioned over a year before, and then only in passing. I had noticed that it was usually the things one did not want remembered that he retained. A white lie, an embarrassing error, a social gaffe: it would all be filed for later use. It was the nicer things, like praise for a job well done or recommendation for promotion, that somehow slipped his mind. The only reason that he remembered my aunt was that he disapproved of my love of walking.
‘You are going down to visit her,’ he informed me. ‘That is where Hopkinson has gone, according to his statement. It is my opinion that you might