Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [14]
If Turlough felt a little trapped by the conversation he didn’t appear able to think of a suitable excuse to end it. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Dad had an affair with a twenty-year-old bimbo from the typing pool. There was a bit of a scandal in a kind of small-town way and we moved up the coast.
My mother hated me and I got sent to boarding school. Well, you know what it’s like?’
‘Yes,’ said Turlough with genuine sympathy. ‘I do.’
‘I lasted a couple of terms there before I got expelled. When I was fifteen, I ran away to Sydney and squatted in Kings Cross till dad caught up with me and parcelled me off to live with his sister in England. If that hadn’t happened, I’d probably have ended up on the streets.’
‘But why an air hostess for goodness sake?’
Tegan shrugged. ‘It seemed like a glamorous life style? And besides, I wasn’t smart enough to be a brain surgeon!’
‘Ah, there you are,’ said the Doctor wandering past his young companions and leaning on a rail overlooking the Thames. The sun had finally given up the ghost and set, leaving the river to catch its dying twilight rays. ‘I love London, don’t you?’ he asked no one in particular.
‘You’re alive, so presumably it wasn’t a trap,’ said Tegan.
‘No. It was a job.’
‘From the Time Lords?’
‘Hardly.’ The Doctor spun round and tapped Turlough on the shoulder. ‘Nice to see you back in one piece. Have either of you ever been to America?’
‘No,’ said Tegan.
‘Me neither,’ added Turlough. ‘Why?’
The Doctor had that abstracted look on his face. The look that he always seemed to get just before they landed somewhere new. If Tegan hadn’t known him and his attitude to life (in all its forms) better she would have equated it with some kind of thrill-seeking, as though the prospect of walking blindly into dangerous and life-threatening situations gave him an enormous kick.
‘Travel broadens the mind,’ noted the Doctor. ‘I’ll explain on the way.’
28
Chapter Three
Kill Surf City
‘OK, we’ve checked your credentials. It appears that you guys are more or less who you say you are. You can go now,’ said the FBI special agent who, Barrington thought, looked like a dead ringer for Harry Kim out of Voyager.
As an apology, it left a lot to be desired.
‘About bloody time,’ shouted Paynter angrily, standing in the cramped interview room and picking up his hand luggage from the table. ‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to give me a detailed list of the names of everybody involved in this cockup – particularly that sadist from immigration who did the rectal cav-ity search – so that when I get back to UNIT we can do the official complaint thing and make sure that you all get the effing sack?’
Agent ‘Harry’ pushed Paynter and Barrington’s UNIT passes across the desk.
‘I’m sorry that you feel that way, sir,’ he said. ‘We’re only doing our job. But if you’d told us earlier that you were working for the UN and only acting like a pair of soccer hooligan scum –’
‘I ought to punch your ruddy lights out, son,’ roared Paynter. ‘For one thing, right, what’s the point of being in a covert undercover organisation if you go around telling everybody who you are? And for another, it’s football, not soccer.’
‘Bit of a sore point with him I’m afraid,’ said Barrington, quietly. ‘The football bit. He’s been known to rip out a geezer’s rib cage and play “Come and Have a Go If You Think You’re Hard Enough” on it over less.’
‘The door is there, gentlemen,’ said ‘Harry’.
Barrington stood up and left but Paynter remained where he was, watching the agent closely, like a snake hypnotising its prey. ‘Have fun lining up at the welfare on Monday, pal,’ he said as he followed his partner, muttering
‘ Americans! ’
‘You really ought to think about aggression control sessions,’ said Barrington as they walked through the now deserted customs hall.
An hour earlier it had been chaos and they had lost Bulyjin in the seething mass of humanity. Delay had followed delay and finally Paynter had snapped and threatened a hapless immigration official with a display of manic ultraviolence if they didn’t ‘get a