Doctor Who_ Wolfsbane - Jac Rayner [0]
JACQUELINE RAYNER
B B C
DOCTOR WHO: WOLFSBANE
3 5 7 9 1 0 8 6 4 2
Reprinted in 2007 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
A Random House Group Company
First published 2003
Copyright © Jacqueline Rayner 2003
Jacqueline Rayner has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Original series broadcast on BBC Television. Format © BBC 1963
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ISBN 9780563486091
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Commissioning Editor: Ben Dunn
Editor and Creative Consultant: Justin Richards Project Editor: Vicki Vrint
Cover imaging by Black Sheep © BBC 2003
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox and Wyman
With thanks to Mum and Dad for support, to Gary and Justin for understanding, to Peter Linford for burial advice, and to Nick, my husband-to-be (who by the time this is published will be my husband-who-is), for being lovely.
Chapter One
Lost Friends
Just over a week till the shortest day, but all the flowers were in bloom. The sweet spring smell of cherry blossom spun Sarah to warmer times even as she picked her way through the snow, lantern turning the white to a dull orange at her feet.
It would be years - she didn‟t know how many, just that it hadn‟t happened yet - before there was significant reform in this area. She didn‟t know if this asylum would be like the Victorian hospitals of her imagination: strait-jackets and wailing men and warders who didn‟t care, but that was what she was expecting. They used to lock up unmarried mothers, didn‟t they? Poor ones, anyway. You went in, sane but ignorant or stupid, and fifty years later they realised you were still there, hopeless, despairing, and utterly mad. Like going to the doctor‟s for a check-up and catching flu in the waiting room, only a million, million times worse.
Knocking on the door, she felt a dip in her heart. She was a child again, expecting a terrifying and towering grown-up to fling it open and roar at her. But the man who peered through the shutter and slid the bolts back was the same height as her, quiet and bald. She‟d been right about the wailing, though. Screams and sobs came from every side, and she had to fight to keep the adult journalist on top and not the scared child. There was no electricity here and the gas lamps were turned low - light wasn‟t considered a fundamental human right, obviously. What did these people have to look at, anyway? Perhaps in the dark they could imagine themselves in a better place.
She‟d unconsciously been expecting a prison visitor‟s room: plastic chairs or perspex screens and warders all around. But before she could protest, she was inside his room and the door bolted behind her. Just her and him. Her and the lunatic. Was the gleam in his eye because he‟d worked out how to untie his bonds, was he waiting for the footsteps to recede before making his move?
She took a deep breath and hunkered down on the floor, bringing herself down to his eyeline therefore less imposing and more inviting of confidences. The warder had said he made no sense, but she had to get him to talk to her. She had to get him to tell her how Harry Sullivan had died.
There had been just Sarah and Harry.
„I think