Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [32]
‘But in case he won’t drink,’ said the Doctor, ‘you offer him a twenty-five-year-old GlenMactavish instead.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ said the Brigadier.
‘Public relations are of the essence,’ explained Freeth.
‘The Doctor’s quite right. We have to tread carefully. I have come to know the people of your world very well over the last thirty years or so.’
He’d been here for thirty years? There’d been alien undercover agents here for thirty years?
‘I fell in love with your pretty little planet, and indeed with your exquisitely quaint country, when I came on an early scouting mission as a young man.
‘Hardly out of short trousers; a mere child,’ he added hurriedly. And it wasn’t a joke, thought the Brigadier.
‘And you’ve been visiting ever since?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Waiting until the time was ripe,’ agreed Freeth.
The flying saucers, by Jove!
‘So,’ said the Brigadier, working it out, ‘you plan to get the public on your side before it’s revealed that you come from outside the solar system. Give them a spoonful of honey to help the pill go down. Right?’
‘Exactly right. Except that in this case, it’ll turn out to be honey, honey, honey all the way.’ He fluttered his eyelashes at the Brigadier and with a little tilt of his head, smiled at him lovingly.
Jeremy found a phone box very quickly; there was a row of them at the end of the avenue just opposite the space ship thing. However, when he got through to the duty office at UNIT, it took an age for them to answer, even longer to put them through to the duty officer, a Captain Yates –
which they insisted on doing when he asked for the Brigadier – and even longer still for Captain Yates to discover that the Brigadier wasn’t at home.
So by the time he rang the other number, he was pretty frantic. Anything could be happening to Sarah, anything at all. He kept his eyes fastened on the dark, silent dome of the saucer-shaped ship and waited. What else could he do but wait?
‘Sounded fair enough to me,’ said the Brigadier.
Freeth had shown every intention of escorting them all the way to the car, but the Doctor had refused to allow it, politely but firmly.
‘Maybe we’ve been misjudging him,’ added the Brigadier as they walked down the stairs.
‘On the principle that anybody who knows his malts as well as he does can’t be all bad?’ the Doctor said.
Not such a bad principle at that, thought the Brigadier, but before he could answer, the Doctor went on, ‘Lucrezia Borgia put her poisons into only the finest vintages, or so she once told me.’ They stopped for the night porter to open the massive teak door for them.
Declining to enter such deep waters, the Brigadier said,
‘Actually, I meant this PR idea. Softening up the public and all that.’
The Doctor said, ‘Oh, it’ll work. It’s the same as throwing maggots into the river to attract the poor fish you hope to have for dinner.’
Bessie was waiting patiently at the bottom of the steps. ‘Your choice of metaphor is hardly flattering,’ said the Brigadier as they got in.
‘It wasn’t intended to be,’ said the Doctor, starting the engine.
The phone rang.
‘Greyhound One. Come in please, over,’ said the Brigadier into the receiver.
‘Oh Lord,’ said an agitated voice. ‘I think I must have got the wrong number. I wanted to speak to the Brigadier.’
‘That’s the phone, not the RT,’ the Doctor said in slight irritation, switching Bessie’s engine off again.
‘Oh yes, of course. Lethbridge-Stewart here. Who’s that?’
‘Jeremy Fitzoliver. Sarah Jane Smith asked me to ring.
It’s sort of urgent, really.’
‘What’s up?’
‘We’ve found those dog thingies that killed that man. At least we think we have...’ The further into his tale, the higher Jeremy’s voice rose. By the time the Brigadier had got through to him the urgent necessity of saying exactly where he was speaking from, it was a frantic squeak.
‘That’s just it, you see, Sarah’s gone into one of those space ship thingies after the dogs and they’ve closed the doors!’ By this time, the Doctor had restarted the engine, swung the car round and was driving flat out towards