Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [10]
There was something delightfully English about the Doctor’s eccentric clothes. An Edwardian cricketing costume that could have slipped from the pages of Kipling; candy-striped trousers and a beige frock coat with a sprig of celery pinned to one lapel. Many had thought about asking him why it was there. Few actually had.
He was of slender build, willowy and athletic. He had a sweet young face, pleasant and open with high cheekbones, topped by a neat head of corn-blond hair. He possessed little of the flamboyant charisma of some of his predecessors, which made him, in the eyes of individuals obsessed with such aesthetics, bland and ordinary. Yet when he smiled in his charmingly boyish way, and the glint of the sun caught his eyes, there was something impossibly ancient about him.
Something eternal.
‘If you say so.’ Tegan scowled as she passed a hand across her brow. She squinted up at the sun and sighed deeply. ‘I hate this place in summer. The air’s so bad you can hardly breathe, it’s always gridlocked and it needs a population transplant!’
Typical Tegan, thought the Doctor. As subtle as a flying sledgehammer.
The Australian girl’s short, rainbow summer dress, a stunning contrast to her dark auburn hair, was a vivid overpowering splash of multicolour in this 21
most mundane of settings, cutting through the hot, smoggy air like a light-house beacon.
‘Never mind,’ said the Doctor encouragingly as they found a seat outside the tube station. ‘We’ll only be here for a few hours. I have to meet someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Whom,’ corrected the Doctor.
Tegan tutted loudly at his pedantry. ‘Whatever.’
‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor said, pulling a rolled-up copy of the New Scientist from his frock-coat pocket and handing it to Tegan. ‘Page seventy-three’.
She opened the magazine and stared at a page of personal ads.
‘Column three, fourth one down,’ the Doctor said helpfully.
Someone in search of his Doctor.
Requires REGENERATIVE qualities.
ANY accepted.
The National Portrait Gallery. July 3rd. Noon.
‘That’s a bit cryptic,’ noted Tegan, handing the magazine back.
‘I think that’s the general idea,’ replied the Doctor with a grin.
‘Could it be a trap?’
The Doctor shrugged his shoulders and looked uninterested. ‘It’s possible, I suppose,’ he answered truthfully. ‘But I doubt it. The cost of the advert alone.
Not one of my mortal enemies would pay thirteen pounds and twenty-five pence to ensure my death. Not even the Master.’
‘Very funny,’ said Tegan looking around at the milling crowd of tourists and shoppers. ‘You want me to come along?’ she asked.
‘No. There’s no sense in putting you in danger as well.’
‘But I thought . . . ’
‘I wasn’t being entirely serious, Tegan,’ noted the Doctor with another little grin. ‘Besides, I told Turlough you’d meet him by the Centre Point fountain.’
Tegan could feel herself getting annoyed.
It was the weather, clearly.
‘Where’s he gone, anyway?’
‘To see an old friend, apparently. A solicitor in Chancery Lane.’ There the conversation seemed to come to a full stop. As dead as Christmas on 27
December.
‘Oh,’ the girl replied with little interest. She knew that she should really try harder where Turlough was concerned, but he made casual conversation so difficult. ‘Where do you want us to meet up with you then?’ she asked the Doctor.
22
‘The usual place. Don’t be late.’
And with that he was gone at a brisk pace, into the heaving crowds down the Charing Cross Road.
‘Last time it was the Tate Gallery, I remember,’ said the Doctor brightly, taking a bite from an apple as he sensed a presence behind him. ‘Why the change of venue?’
‘Sorry, Doctor, but I have a low tolerance threshold for the life and works of Joseph Turner. Even if he was a personal friend of yours!’
The Doctor spun round, a beaming smile on his face. ‘Brigadier!’ he cried, and then blushed at the loudness of his voice in this normally hushed place.
A few heads turned in his direction from further