Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [106]
But no one noticed that.
Everyone was staring at the person who had spoken.
The source of the voice which had commanded them all. The voice like fire burning into their minds.
Everyone was staring at Ricky McIlveen.
The crowd stood looking at Ricky and Ricky looked back at them.
Finally the monk had to shout from the floor of the corridor where he was writhing and wrestling with the desperate old man. ‘Somebody help me. Somebody call the police!’ His voice was strangely thin and ineffectual after Ricky’s. A cheap imitation fashioned from inferior materials.
Several of the kids, jocks on their way to the gym, came out of their paralysis and rushed to help him. One of them scuttled down the corridor, bent down and gingerly picked up the fallen pistol as though it might be red hot. The other kids in the hallway kept right on staring at Ricky.
Except for Wally. He turned to stare at Wolf, and Wolf turned to meet his gaze.
As their eyes met Wally knew that things had changed forever.
For him and for Wolf, and for the whole school.
Then suddenly he couldn’t see anything more in Wolf’s eyes, because Wolf turned and fled.
From the window of her office Amy could see the flashing blue lights of the ambulance and the police cars.
There had been three police cars, but one of them followed the ambulance as it shot away along the small service-road that led into the centre of the school complex.
The vehicles hit the main highway and accelerated towards the hospital, their sirens keening as though in mourning for Daniel Pangbourne.
A second police car followed them a moment later, but this one was heading in the opposite direction, towards the police-station. Locked in the back, sitting ramrod straight, was Wolf’s dad. Francis Leemark. The old man had his chin up, full of defiance.
The second police car had a bit of trouble getting started, slewing in the churned ocean of mud which an hour earlier had been carefully tended lawn and shrubbery.
‘Thank God he can’t see what they’ve done to his garden,’ said Amy.
‘Yes,’ said the man called Retour. He was sitting in one of the armchairs that dominated her small office, his leg casually hitched over the side. Now he got up and joined her at the window. ‘A crime scene does tend to get a lot of wear and tear.’
Outside only the third police car remained; the two officers assigned to it were inside the school, sitting in the gym behind some hastily arranged folding tables. They were trying to take coherent statements, one at a time, from dozens of semi-hysterical kids who sat waiting, bored or weeping, on the bleachers.
Retour looked out of the window and studied the intersecting morass of tyre tracks and footprints; he smiled. ‘If the headwounds don’t finish Pangbourne off, one glance at this mess will.’
Amy turned and stared at the man, her blue-green eyes suddenly alight with anger. ‘This has all worked out according to plan for you, hasn’t it?’
Retour turned and met her stare, quite unperturbed. He had a studious angular face, thin and carved with fine lines, like a pious monk obsessed with study. His eyebrows were bushy and dark, rising in jagged shapes over his eyes.
Looking at Amy he seemed distant and amused, no more than mildly curious about her or anything else.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You planned it. You expected Leemark to come in and kill Mr Pangbourne.’
‘Kill him? According to those attentive young fellows from the ambulance, Mr Pangbourne is still very much alive, registering brain activity, and a whole host of other fascinating subtle metabolic signs.’ Retour shrugged. ‘And even if paramedics are, by definitions, people who weren’t quite bright enough to be doctors, I don’t think we should dismiss their opinions out of hand. They seemed like nice enough guys.’
‘You know what I mean,’ said Amy. ‘This is exactly what you planned. Old-man Leemark comes in and goes berserk.
And poor Dan Pangbourne takes the brunt of it.’
‘On the contrary. I never planned