Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [31]
She took in a lungful of the heady, spicy atmosphere. Even without the evidence of her eyes, she would have known she was in the Orient again, but nothing could contrast more with the serenity of the garden she had visited earlier. Bustle was the order of the day. Luckily this meant that everyone was far too busy with their own business to notice two western‐looking women appearing abruptly in a side street.
Celia sniffed. ‘Frank used to love markets,’ she said.
‘Yeah, he was probably comparing prices,’ said Martha, her sympathy almost entirely exhausted by now. Then she did a mental double take. ‘Hang on, you mean you come to places like this a lot? I’ve heard of people trading in endangered animals, but they’re not going to do it in the open like this, are they?’
‘Don’t be naive,’ said Celia. ‘It happens all the time. Or else they just don’t know or don’t care.’ She held up her pendant, using it like a compass, then pointed towards a stall with crates stacked in front of it. ‘That’s where we want to be.’
They threaded their way through the crowd, passing rows of squawking chickens suspended from ropes by their feet, hearing the barking of caged dogs that Martha couldn’t bear to look at. London’s food markets, with their organic veg and local cheeses and men yelling about ‘free pahndsa strawbries fra pahnd’, seemed worlds away.
The crates Celia had indicated turned out to contain heaped piles of turtles. A few curious chelonian heads swung up to look as she plunged her hands in and began to sort through the stacks of shells. The stallholder beamed across at the two women. ‘Yes, yes, take your time, all are very good,’ he said.
Finally Celia located her prize, and pointed out a turtle that Martha would have been hard‐pressed to distinguish from all the others if it hadn’t been for the three black stripes on its back. She couldn’t really get her head around it: this little brown and green creature – with its surprisingly cute face for a reptile – was the only one of its kind on Earth. That was hard to deal with. This was it, journey’s end for an entire species. What made it really difficult, though, was the banality of it all. People going about their ordinary, everyday business and suddenly whoops, no more turtles, and did any of them give a monkey’s? Didn’t seem like it. Without them, some diner would have tucked into his turtle soup, not caring that he would be the last person in the universe ever to be near even the remains of a unique creature.
A thought struck her. ‘You got the call to come here, what, minutes ago?’
Celia nodded.
‘And you get the call when the little light goes on in Eve’s office, that means there’s only one animal left.’
Another nod.
‘But then… a few minutes ago, there must have been another one. Another turtle. There must have been two turtles, and then something happened to one of them, and now this is the only one left.’
‘That’s right.’
Martha screwed up her forehead. ‘But… but… that means that if we’d known about it just a little bit earlier, we could have saved that other turtle too. It might have been, you know, a boy turtle. If this one’s a girl turtle. Or the other way around. You could have taken them both back and they’d have had little baby turtles, and the baby turtles would have had baby turtles, and yes, OK, we’re talking a bit of inbreeding here, but the species would have been saved. All for the sake of a minute or two!’
‘It’d hardly be the Museum of the Last Ones, then,’ Celia pointed out. ‘It would be the Museum of the Last Two, for a while, until they start breeding and then who knows?’
Martha nodded hard. ‘But that’s the point!’
The other