Doctor Who_ The Banquo Legacy - Andy Lane [74]
Letting out a little yelp of panic, I whirled, slamming the door and taking two rapid paces backwards to avoid any attack. Nothing. There was no one behind the door. Panicky now, I jerked around to survey the rest of the room. The bed lurked in the centre, menacing me with its presence. I slowly bent and looked underneath.
Nothing.
‘Stratford!’ Herr Kreiner yelled from the corridor. ‘Everything all right in there?’
‘So far,’ I shouted back, the volume disguising the tremble in my voice.
Two steps and I was at the wardrobe. The door caught on my first pull. I pulled again and it swung open. Slowly. I took a step back.
Nothing.
The bathroom. Five steps. Marble tiles and a huge bath.
Nothing.
Behind the curtains.
Nothing. The windows weren’t even open.
How many rooms were there on this floor? Seven? Ten? I couldn’t go through this for every single one. Just checking mine, a room I was familiar with, had almost reduced me to hysterics. I crossed the now safe room to the door. I couldn’t let Hopkinson see me like this. Deep breath, two, three and pull open the door. The corridor outside was dark but I could just make out the figure of John Hopkinson at the end. He must have moved pretty fast to get there. Had that man got no nerves at all?
* * *
THE ACCOUNT OF JOHN HOPKINSON (18)
I knew that Stratford was a professional, but while I might suspect that the Metropolitan Police force held lectures on how to search a large bedroom in twelve seconds flat, it seemed impossible that he could have progressed to the end of the passageway in the time it had taken me to walk once round Catherine Harries’s bedroom, cautiously pulling open all the cupboards and checking behind the curtains.
I hesitated a moment, gaping in awe at the figure silhouetted at the end of the corridor. I glanced back and saw that Kreiner, back by the stairs, was also watching the figure. And as I turned back, I realised that another large figure stood beside me, equally fascinated by the person at the end of the corridor.
The person beside me was Ian Stratford and we became aware of each other at the same moment – the moment that the figure at the far end of the passage became aware of us and moved towards us, and came out into the light of the one dim lamp still burning in the corridor.
* * *
THE REPORT OF INSPECTOR IAN STRATFORD (18)
The door to my right, the door through which I had seen John Hopkinson disappear a few moments before, opened.
John Hopkinson walked out. He looked to his right along the corridor and I could see his mouth moving, forming the word ‘Inspector’. Time seemed to be moving slowly, like treacle flowing past both of us. It was possible to believe that I could see every muscle around his mouth moving in sequence as Hopkinson mimed the three silent syllables of the word. I don’t know if he actually made any noise at all. The buzzing in my ears was far too loud for that. I became fascinated by the almost imperceptibly small movements of his lips as they glistened in the light of the nearby lamp. I had once read Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey in which he described the effect of drug-induced hallucinations; although, God knows, I had heard enough ravings from itinerant sailors dragged out of the drug dens of Limehouse to know the details. That was what I felt as I stood there. The slowing of time, the feeling that I was simultaneously too large and too small for the corridor, the feeling that my mind was disconnected from my body… But I was not drugged. I just did not want to look at the figure at the end of the passageway. I was frightened; no, I was terrified. My fear was something real and huge and outside myself, crowding in on me like the wings of death. Some part of me, some long-buried survival instinct that modern man has little use for, was warning me that to turn and look would be to risk my sanity. It knew before I did who it was down by the turn that led to Richard Harries’s room. My subconscious mind was delaying me, in the same way that I am even now delaying the moment