Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [27]
He followed them into the room, but not before the Brigadier had heard the end of a conversation of an apparently terminal nature, culminating in an angry ‘Well, I’m sorry!’ and a noisy clatter as the receiver was banged home.
‘Sorry,’ Tom said again, at the Professor’s over polite request for his assistance. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, pulling out the appropriate drawer, ‘I was better off with Imogen.’
‘You can see for yourself,’ said Willow, as they gazed down at the pitiful horror which had been Nobby (it said on his label: Bartholemew Clark). ‘The marks of the teeth and the tearing of the flesh are extremely atypical.’
The Brigadier, for all his experience in battle (and indeed, in the bloodier aspects of his UNIT job), found the sight extremely disturbing, reminiscent of a butcher’s stall in an Eastern street market.
‘What’s more,’ continued the Professor, ‘since the preliminary report, I have found even more reason for puzzlement. I have analysed the traces of saliva on the deceased’s clothes, what was left of them; and of all things, it turned out to be acidic.’
So? thought the Brigadier. What had that got to do with anything? The Doctor, however, was of a different opinion.
‘Acidic?’ he said with great satisfaction. ‘Then that settles it. The creature who perpetrated this horror is not of this planet. We have our proof.’
Typical! ‘There’s still nothing to connect Freeth and his friends with the attack, Doctor, and that’s what we need.’
The Doctor was scornful. ‘You have the mind of a six-and-eightpenny lawyer, Lethbridge-Stewart. It’s good enough for me.’
So they were no better off! But the Doctor hadn’t finished. ‘Stop!’ he said, as Doctor Prebble started to close the drawer, Tom having disappeared again.
‘What is it?’ asked the Professor.
‘There’s a hair.’
‘Where?’
‘There, man, there! As plain as the nose on your face.
Under the nail of the second digit of the left hand.’
Brian Prebble flushed. ‘There can’t be,’ he said. ‘I collected scrapings from every fingernail. It’s standard procedure. There were no hairs; in fact, there were no fibres of any kind.’
The three doctors were bent over the body, peering at its hand. The Brigadier tried to get a glimpse between their heads. He was blowed if he could see any hair.
‘See for yourself. It’s nearly half a millimeter long. Well, don’t just stand there, Willow. Get me a microscope slide and some tweezers! Jump to it!’
Appalled at such lese-majesty, Prebble jumped to it instead.
‘Sticking out a mile,’ said the Doctor, carefully retrieving it. ‘I can’t think how you came to miss it, the two of you. If you want to get on in this profession...’ His voice trailed off in concentration.
‘Don’t mind the Doctor, Professor Willow,’ said the Brigadier. ‘He’s apt to get a little excited.’
The Professor smiled. ‘Please don’t apologize. It’s getting on for thirty-five years since anybody treated me like a backward student. I find it strangely exhilarating.’
The Doctor was soon peering down the powerful microscope and grunting as he adjusted the focus ‘Aha!’ he cried.
‘What is it?’
‘Take a look.’
‘Mmm,’ murmured the Professor. ‘How very strange.
The cuticle is... But on the other hand...’ He stood up. ‘It is clearly a hair of animal origin, but no ordinary hair. I have certainly never seen anything of the sort before. What is without doubt is that this did not come from a mammal.
And if he wasn’t attacked by a mammal, what in heaven’s name did attack him?’
Chapter Ten
Sometimes the Brigadier found that the Doctor seemed to be taken over by a manic energy which brushed aside all forms of normal behaviour. Their exit from the mortuary was a case in point. Talking, talking, talking what seemed to be a farrago of nonsense – although the Professor and Doctor Prebble, forced by politeness to follow him to the front door, seemed to understand him – he suddenly darted back ‘to fetch his handkerchief’, waving away all offers to get it for him.
The Brigadier