Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [46]
Larna had started with a couple of discreet observations. The Magistrate had known the Doctor all his life, and although they’d had their differences in the past, it was clear that they loved one another. He commended Larna on her insight.
Then he had proceeded to recount an anecdote from the Doctor’s and his murky past, a ribald incident that had taken place during a trip to Low Town. He and Larna had laughed, and for the first time she realised why the Doctor and the Magistrate were such friends.
She had walked into the Chamber – puzzled by the guard on the door, and the Magistrate’s need to exchange whispered words with him – and she had found herself staring at the corpse of one of her friends.
Waym was slumped over the control console. They hadn’t covered the body, they hadn’t even moved him or closed his eyes. He lay in a pool of his own blood. Waym’s clothes had self-repaired and self-cleaned and so the tabard didn’t bear a single hint of the stab wound that had killed him. All around them the Infinity Chamber was still running its programme, panning and zooming in, zooming out and panning, over and over. Perhaps it was that making her dizzy.
The Magistrate was hovering behind her.
‘And what exactly was it that you wanted me to see in here?’ he asked, his voice still containing some levity. Talking to her, joking about the Doctor, it had all been a ploy to put her at her ease. He hoped to lull her into false security, he hadn’t wanted to give her time to prepare. The result was that Larna felt cut adrift, as though her mind and body were in two places.
‘I didn’t do this,’ she said, aware that the words sounded slightly hysterical.
‘I didn’t suggest that you had,’ the Magistrate said calmly.
‘Oh yes you did,’ Larna said, finally finding something to latch on to, something that wasn’t Waym’s corpse.
Composure and control. She had to be rational. ‘Why hasn’t he regenerated?’ she asked.
‘Did you think that he would when you stabbed him? It could be construed as mitigating circumstances.’
‘I didn’t… do you really think that I am capable of such an act?’
He smiled. ‘We are all capable. The attacker inserted the knife through the left heart, then brought the blade through the spinal column and the second heart. Surgically precise.
Death was instantaneous.’
All it would have needed was a thought. If Waym had managed to think a single word before he died, he’d have triggered the regeneration. His body would have done the rest for him. It needn’t have been his thought. If she had been here, she could have thought it for him, inserted the keyword telepathically. ‘Can’t the surgeons do anything?’
The Magistrate’s eyes were boring into hers, he was almost certainly reading her thoughts. ‘No. It’s too late for that. The murderer knew what… he or she was doing. But, my dear, you wouldn’t have known how to do it, even if you wanted to, would you?’
Larna turned to him, tried to convey her sincerity. ‘No. I was here last night, he asked me to check something for him.’
‘What time last night?’
‘Just before I went to the Doctor’s room – about the time the aliens arrived. Savar’s program is still running.’
‘Savar?’
‘He was here when we arrived. There’s some sort of freak effect that he and Waym noticed. Can I show you?’
The Magistrate allowed her over to the console, lifting Waym’s body off and dumping it down on the floor. Larna tried not to think about it, she concentrated on the console, blanking the bloodstains from her mind.
‘Here,’ she said, pulling a couple of levers. ‘A disturbance in spacetime that passed over Gallifrey as the fleets arrived.’
‘A fault with the system,’ the Magistrate concluded. He used Infinity Chambers every day as part of his job, he knew that they weren’t infallible.
‘That was what I thought. I ran a check.’ She located the relevant display panel.
The Magistrate bent over it, confirmed that there wasn’t a malfunction. Then he returned to the