Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [58]
‘A human time-traveller who fancied himself as a Lord of Time. An ape who would be a king.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘With fists the size of hams, that’s what I always remember about him. He gave me quite a lot of trouble for a while. Sabbath started playing with the time lines, created whole new histories. For the sake of the structure of time and space, I had to correct that. For months on end I watched whole universes die.’
‘More death.’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor said quietly. ‘Millions of lives ended. Gone.’
‘Your point?’
The Doctor perked up. ‘Ah yes. So, to sum up: your theory of me is that I was racked with guilt, cowardly and couldn’t stand the thought I’d killed so many people, so I had some sort of nervous breakdown and suppressed my memory of it because I couldn’t cope. But all the evidence that you yourself have collected demonstrates the exact opposite. Hasn’t it occurred to you that your theory might be flawed?’
Rachel was thinking this through. ‘He’s right.’
Marnal was trying very hard not to look worried. ‘If you murder someone, you’re a murderer. If you murder more people, it makes the first crime worse, it doesn’t excuse it. Forgetting why you did it isn’t a mitigating circumstance, and not knowing why you forgot it is entirely irrelevant.’
Rachel was struggling to keep up. ‘I think you’re right too,’ she said unhelpfully.
‘We’ve been asking the wrong question,’ the Doctor said. ‘There’s a larger game being played here.’
‘So you think we’d settle this if we knew why you lost your memory?’ Rachel asked.
‘No,’ the Doctor replied. ‘No. That’s the wrong question too.’
‘So what’s the right question?’
‘Ah. . . that I don’t know. I was hoping that together the two of us – the three of us, sorry, Rachel – could come up with it.’
Marnal’s patience had run out. ‘I’ve answered the only question that matters.’
122
‘ARMED POLICE! WE HAVE YOU SURROUNDED!’
The Doctor winced. It was to the point, he supposed, but couldn’t the officer have thought of something more elegant?
‘You called the police?’ Marnal shouted. ‘This is your idea of a truce?’
‘What did you say to them?’ Rachel asked.
‘I just said who I was,’ the Doctor said. ‘And that you had a gun and a hostage, but I was fine, I’d sort it out, so there was no need for them to come round.’
Marnal was walking over to retrieve his gun.
‘Look, Marnal, I meant what I said before.’
Marnal tucked the gun away. ‘Only you could break a promise before you even made it,’ he said.
A squad car had been three streets away when the 999 call had been relayed to them. A couple of young constables had turned their car around and come straight to the house. They’d been warned that there was a hostage situation, and that the kidnapper was armed, so while they waited for back-up they confined their activities to assessing the situation and getting the neighbours to stay indoors and away from the windows. Another two cars arrived within minutes, along with an ambulance. One of the new cars had brought an inspector, who took control of the scene and had the officers establishing an inner and outer cordon. By now, a van with officers in body armour had arrived, along with a couple more cars. The vehicles were parked to block the road off and provide a corral for the officers staking out the building.
The police knew very little. A man had phoned 999, given them this address and said that someone was being held hostage, probably in the detached garage. The hostage-taker was a man in his thirties wearing a distinctive blue blazer, and he had a pistol, a taser and possibly other weapons. There were only three people on the premises. Then the caller had hung up. The phone call had come from the landline of the house itself. The two officers who’d been first on the scene reported what the next-door neighbours had told them: there was one resident of the house, an elderly man who the neighbours thought had been at death’s door. Most days, his nurse came round for a few hours.
Hostage situations took one form pretty much the whole world over – the authorities waited,