Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [16]
And there were no houses around here, she must have walked a long way like that.
‘Aren’t you frozen?’ he asked.
She didn’t look it. Someone might have dropped her off here. But why?
The young girl smiled and said something, but so quietly he couldn’t hear.
The policeman moved over to her. ‘What’s your name, miss?’ he asked.
She indicated that she wanted to whisper it to him. She was half his height, so he had to bend down to her. As he did so, he gave her an encouraging smile.
‘>:-(’ she said, before lunging at him, grabbing his throat and crushing his Adam’s apple under her thumbs.
The policeman made an attempt to get up, but she was a dead weight around his neck. He tried calling for help, but no sound came out. Now he tried to breathe, but he just couldn’t suck air into his lungs – the grip around his throat was too tight. He felt himself weaken, saw everything going black.
If he hadn’t bent down, he realised, she wouldn’t have been able to reach his neck. She was about ten years old.
He was dead before he hit the snow. The girl stood over the body, her Clarks sandal pressed down on his windpipe, for more than a minute just to make sure.
∗ ∗ ∗
35
They’d gritted the paths around Greyfrith County Primary School, and that had taken all the fun away. Miranda had been hoping she could slide the length of the playground, but its surface was now a dull red-grey mush that was getting into her shoes.
Her friend Rachel was shivering. ‘They should let us inside.’
‘No one else looks that cold,’ Miranda noted. She rarely felt cold herself, but the Doctor, her father, told her she should always be careful to wear a coat, to blend in.
The Doctor had been her father for almost a year. It was the second time she’d been adopted. Her original adoptive parents had been killed in a car accident. She wanted to stay with the Doctor, and the Doctor was keen for her to do so. Even with the backing of her teacher, Mrs Castle, and a number of character references from some of the people the Doctor had met over the years, like Graham Greene and Laurence Olivier, it had taken a long time to become official.
But Miranda always thought of the Doctor as her father.
Like her, he had two hearts. Like her, he would often stare up at the night sky, and feel some strange sense that up there was home and living down here was just a temporary thing.
‘What are they playing at?’ Rachel asked.
She meant the question literally. Two of the boys, Adrian and Chris, sat next to each other on a step, each with some sort of electronic device in their hands.
Miranda went up to them, but they didn’t even look up. They were staring intently into the little screens, their thumbs working away at the buttons beneath. Every so often there would be a furtive bleep or buzz. The boys seemed totally absorbed. Their conversation rarely sparkled, but it was usually better than this.
Miranda bent over to get a better look, but all she could see was a set of seemingly random letters, numbers and other symbols. It was like a code of some kind.
‘What are those?’ she asked.
Adrian looked up, as if it was the first time he’d registered she was there.
‘They’re giving them out,’ he said.
‘But what are they?’
‘They’re giving them out,’ Chris echoed. He’d always been one to follow his friend’s lead.
It looked like a walkie-talkie, or a toy telephone.
‘Can I have a look?’
‘Get your own,’ Adrian said.
Chris just glared at her. Miranda stepped back.
36
‘Where from?’
‘New girl.’ He pointed to a small redhead in a bobble hat. There were a handful of kids around her, and she had a black bag on her shoulder that was almost the size she was.
‘What’s her name?’ Rachel asked, but the boys were absorbed in the latest craze.
By the end of the day, every kid in the school had one of the electronic devices, and every one of them had ended up as antisocial as Adrian and Chris. During classes no one played with their devices, but it was eerily quiet. You could sense the phones there, nested in everyone’s schoolbags, waiting for the next