Downtime - Marc Platt [77]
Lethbridge-Stewart smiled. ‘I remember.’ Everywhere today it was memories. He was drowning in them. He hoped it wasn’t his life flashing before him.
He took the tea. The mug had a fierce picture of rampant nurses waving banners and was marked ‘Save the NHS’. One of Kate’s, no doubt. He eyed the boy again. It was difficult to think of him as anything other than a pupil, even if he had forcibly departed Brendon three years before. ‘We’ve met again quite recently. Am I right? On something called the astral plane.’
Danny beamed with satisfaction. ‘It wasn’t entirely wasted then.’
‘Extraordinary,’ declared the Brigadier and sipped his tea.
The chugging sound altered in pitch and the cabin dipped for a second. The fish mobile swung freely from the drawing-pin that held it up.
‘Hello,’ the Brigadier said. ‘We’re moving.’
He ignored Kate’s protest and pulled himself off the bed.
From the window, he could see the water and a bank of green foliage sliding past. Still uncertain of his legs, he made his way, hand over hand, to the steps that led up on deck.
The little man with wild hair and a huge scruffy coat who was working the tiller came to attention as soon as he saw the Brigadier emerge.
‘Sir. Glad to see you’re all right, sir.’
Lethbridge-Stewart squinted in the sunlight at their unlikely pilot. Behind him, Kate was saying, ‘Harrods saved you from the Chillys, Dad.’
The little man nodded. ‘Bunch of hooligans, sir. The lad reckoned we were best off well away from them.’
‘Thank you er... Harrods?’
‘Sir,’ he barked.
The Brigadier surveyed the canal banks. They were a mass of overgrown vegetation. The narrow boat was chugging west, away from the city. It occurred to him that after today’s fiasco on the roads, this was the most reliable way to travel. It had been a sensible move to get away from trouble, even if he wasn’t quite sure exactly where they were going.
The narrow boat looked in good shape, colourfully painted with troughs of daffodils set along the roof. But then that sort of orderliness was just what he would have expected from Kate. He liked to think she took after him in that respect.
Gardening was something he had never had time for as a soldier, but he’d kept a spruce patch in his quarters at Brendon, and once he’d retired, he was going to have a place with a large plot to indulge himself in. Above anything, he had always wanted an apple tree.
He glanced at Harrods again. The little tramp was still standing to attention. ‘Army, aren’t you?’ the Brigadier observed. ‘On your uppers?’
‘RAF, sir. Flight Sergeant Haroldson. Squadron got disbanded, sir.’
That was a familiar enough story. The Brigadier could only sympathize. ‘Like losing your family.’ He noticed Kate’s affectionate smile again and returned it with interest.
‘Get called Harrods, sir, ’cos I’m fussy where I kip down.’
He had standards too. The Brigadier would far rather lead one man like Harrods than a hundred of the self-satisfied types that Cavendish represented. ‘Thank you, Flight Sergeant.
Carry on.’
‘Sir.’
With a look of approval, the Brigadier ducked back under the door. ‘The company you keep’s a real eye-opener, Kate.’
‘I thought they were with you,’ she said.
Danny snapped shut the lid of a metal trunk, but not before the Brigadier saw a jumble of coloured bricks and train tracks inside.
‘We can’t stay here, Brigadier,’ the boy said urgently. ‘The Intelligence is hunting us.’
‘Both of us?’ The Brigadier sat down on the bed again.
Under Danny’s coat he glimpsed a green and yellow sweatshirt. ‘Aren’t you one of these Chilly characters too?’
Danny was in earnest. ‘New World’s a front to bring the Intelligence back through. It’s an evil spirit that got bound to the Earth.’
This was the sort of hokum that the Doctor usually came out with, and he was usually right. Of course, the Doctor had never had to write an official report after the event. Over the years, Lethbridge-Stewart had become a dab hand at glossing down the sometimes unbelievable evidence of his