Doctor Who_ The Last Dodo - Jacqueline Rayner [51]
There, planning advice for anyone thinking of installing a secret laboratory with secret doors – make sure it’s got a loo. If Frank had done that, he’d probably be free to this day. ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I told him, and before he could stop me I’d pushed past.
If I was going to find any answers, this looked like the place to be.
Martha gazed around the room, fascinated. Unlike the grotty warehouse where they’d found the rhino, this was a gleaming laboratory, much more in accord with her ideas of what places should look like in the future. There were benches covered with test tubes – about the only scientific equipment that even medical Martha recognised among the vast array of gizmos and gadgets. Behind a desk was a bank of screens, the images too small for her to make out at a distance. There was a variety of creatures, at a variety of life stages, including a pen of dodo chicks, next to a pen of dodo adolescents, next to a pen of fully grown Dorothea lookalikes. Dorothea herself waddled over and rubbed her beak against the wire mesh, eliciting a flurry of flapping feathers and squawks in return. The far wall contained a couple of metal doors solid with bolts – snarls and roars gave Martha a clue as to what could be found behind them.
She’d been right: all those identical animals on Earth, they were clones.
And then she got it, and a rush of relief swept through her: ‘Those animals you were selling off – they were clones too! You weren’t destroying the Last Ones.’ (She fought down the little accusatory voice inside that said: ‘Not like you. Not like you did.’) ‘That’s why there were those double entries on the warehouse computer.’
He curled his lip. ‘Well, duh. Obviously.’
‘Well, duh, Mr Sarcasm.’ Martha put her hands on her hips and regarded him pityingly. ‘So how come the original animals have been disappearing from the museum, then? It’s not as though you need to hide them from the purchasers: no one from Earth’s going to turn up here and realise they’ve been fooled. No one would have suspected anything was going on if it wasn’t for that.’
Frank looked slightly sheepish for a second, before covering it up with a defensive sneer. Martha suddenly felt sick. ‘Oh, I get it. Quick returns. It was taking too long for the animals to grow up – not enough fur on an infant for a coat, is there? So you started taking the originals.’ The sickness turned to anger. ‘How could you? Bad enough killing them anyway, but you were committing genocide again and again, for a few quid!’ Now the anger turned to contempt. ‘Shame you didn’t really think it through. You’re trying to be a criminal mastermind, but you’re obviously just one of those bungling amateur types. So callous you destroyed unique creatures for profit. So incompetent you practically put up a neon sign reading “criminal activity going on here”.’
Frank stood up quickly and Martha’s first instinct was to step back, thinking he was going to hit her. But she held her ground, and he dropped his raised hand. ‘Like you’d understand!’ he yelled, causing a dozen dodos to scuttle backwards in alarm. ‘Agent Jones, all respected and seven‐figure salaried, laying down the law to lesser mortals. How would you know what it’s like?’
She almost laughed. When you’d been the only black female in your class, when you had a student loan that could cripple a small country, when you’d endured the sarcasm or shrieking of consultants every time you’d got an answer wrong, when your current idea of stability was to stay in the same time zone for more than an hour…
‘Yeah, that’s a good excuse,’ she said. ‘I’d use that when your case comes to trial if I were you.’
His eyes narrowed in hate, and with a shock Martha remembered that she was dealing with someone who was willing to kill. She was catching it from the Doctor – let’s mock and patronise the bad guys, because what they can’t bear more than anything else is not to be taken seriously. Laughter wasn’t only the best medicine; it could also be