Doctor Who: Bad Therapy (4 page)

these people with no pasts, didn’t they have friends or jobs?’

Harris sighed – he’d told this story before. ‘Each of them was stepping out with someone. We spoke to the coloured girl’s fiancé–’

The Doctor stood up from his work, a pained expression on his face. He rubbed his forehead with his fingers, unintentionally leaving a smear of the dead boy’s blood behind as he did so. ‘Didn’t she have a name, Chief Inspector?’

‘I’m sorry?’ Harris said, transfixed by the scarlet stain on the Doctor’s forehead.

‘The poor woman is dead. The least we can do is respect her memory by using her name when we talk of her. Hmm?’

Harris shrugged. ‘As you like, Doctor, as you like. Her name was Mary.

Mary Ridgeway. I spoke to her fiancé. Eight weeks they’d been stepping out together, and yet he didn’t know more than her name and address. He’d never met any of her friends. She’d apparently never mentioned her family, either here or back home. And it wasn’t just the boyfriend; the factory where she worked hadn’t taken any references because of the casual nature of the work.

Immigration had never heard of her. As far as anyone could tell she had just dropped out of the sky. Except of course, that’s impossible, isn’t it?’ Harris added, rhetorically.

‘Is it?’ the Doctor asked, as if genuinely considering the possibility.

‘Yes. I think so. Don’t you?’

Eyes twinkling, the Doctor replied, ‘I should think it highly improbable, to say the least. What about the others? Are their life histories just as elusive?’

‘Six people have been murdered and not one of them had so much as a post office savings account to their name. It started in the summer when a pensioner was found lying in the gutter on Gerrard Street. Apparently, she’d been walking home from the pictures with her new husband, another geri-atric. He’d stepped into a pub for a packet of Players and come out to find her face down in the drain. Thought she’d had a heart attack, until he turned her over and caught sight of all the blood.’

‘He must have known more about her, if they were married?’

Harris shook his head. ‘Theirs was a whirlwind romance. They’d only met six weeks before she was killed. The old boy knew no more about her than the others. He turned out to be quite a well-known painter in his day, although apparently his particular style had fallen out of favour with the critics and he hadn’t sold anything for years. The two of them lived quietly in a basement flat in Fitzrovia. Eccentric, but harmless.’

Harris watched the Doctor finish his examination of the dead boy. The little man tossed his surgical robes carelessly on to a bench and Harris followed 17

him into the washroom. There he watched as the Doctor vigorously scrubbed the blood off his hands.

The chief inspector took the opportunity to study the man who had appeared from beneath the pathologist’s anonymous mask and gown. The Doctor’s face moved through several, contortions as he worked at the pink stain on his hands. His was a face which never sat still, as if it were expressing a flowing river of colourful thoughts and ideas. He was quite unlike any pathologist that Harris had encountered before.

‘Do you know what I would do if I were you, Chief Inspector?’ the Doctor said cheerfully, as he dried his hands.

Harris had no idea.

‘I’d start looking for a connection between the victims’ lovers,’ the Doctor continued, as he struggled into a tweed jacket before plonking a battered fedora upon his head. ‘A place where they all go, perhaps socially. Or where they have been in their recent past. I should be very interested to visit a place where one might meet a person who has no past. Sounds liberating, don’t you think?’

Harris considered this. He didn’t like the idea of a place like that at all.

‘Perhaps you’d like to help us find this place. Assist us, informally of course, with the inquiry?’

‘Chief Inspector,’ the Doctor said, as he adjusted his paisley handkerchief so it hung crazily from his breast pocket, ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

‘Won’t you be missed? You must have duties?’

‘I don’t think that will prove to be a problem. Sometimes I don’t think the staff even know that I work here,’ the Doctor added, grinning like a schoolboy.

Chief Inspector Harris said that he knew exactly what the Doctor meant.

It was nine o’clock by the time they left the hospital. The Doctor arranged to meet the chief inspector the following morning before taking his leave and heading back into the depths of Soho.

The sound of rock-and-roll being played with more enthusiasm than skill echoed through a quiet side street. The Doctor followed the sound to a small café squeezed between a drab pub and a grocery shop.

It took him a few minutes to order a cappuccino from the pasty-faced teenager behind the counter, as she was deeply engrossed in an intimate conversation with a young black man who kept leaning across the bar to steal kisses from her. The Doctor slid into a quiet booth at the back and took a sip from the tannin-stained cup.

The café was one of many, usually short-lived, venues which Soho sprouted from time to time. Two serious-looking teenagers stood on a makeshift stage struggling through three-chord skiffle songs on cheap electric guitars. The 18

stage, like the rest of the café, was lit by candles. The proprietors had ripped up the linoleum floor replacing it with wooden boards and there were gashes on the wall where the previous fittings had been torn out. A jukebox stood neglected in the corner – clearly no one thought it cool enough to use.

The Doctor was the oldest person in the café by at least nine hundred years.

London’s youth were flexing their muscles for the first time. Teen boys and teen girls were staking their claim, marking out their territory in the heart of the city. This was the first generation of youth to have money in their pockets and their very own shops to spend it in. Grown-ups were beginning to feel a little threatened by their children’s hedonism and independence, although the Doctor knew that the happy mindlessness of this tiny nation’s youth was going to be rudely shattered by the violence which was brewing even as they danced and kissed. This was London, 1958; the Notting Hill Riots were just around the corner and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

The Doctor offered a sympathetic smile to the teenagers who stared at him with expressions of open hostility, before turning his attention to the business at hand. He pulled the thick card envelope from one of his jacket pockets and spilt the contents out on to the table.

There were pitifully few items. Some coins, a small black wallet, a solitary key and half a packet of chewing gum. Earlier in the day they had been rattling around in the blond boy’s pockets and now they were all that remained of his life. Absently, the Doctor slipped a stick of gum into his mouth and chewed slowly as he turned the items over in his hands.

He had been in two minds as to whether he should hand over the dead boy’s possessions to Chief Inspector Harris. The Doctor felt a little guilty for robbing the police of their only lead; but on the other hand they were unlikely to make any progress on a case as unusual as this. He eased his conscience by telling himself that he would slip the envelope back to the hospital the next day.

There was a photograph in the wallet. Two young men, sixteen or seventeen, standing together in the street. They had their arms around each other’s shoulders and were squinting in the bright autumn sunshine. The Doctor recognized one of the boys as the murder victim, although in this picture his hair was dark. He was standing square on to the camera, looking confident and happy, as if he had everything that he wanted. The other boy looked a little younger, perhaps sixteen, with sandy-coloured hair. He was frowning and smiling at the same time. His smile was awkward, as if he were somehow expecting the worst.

The Doctor almost missed the address. It was written on the back of an Underground ticket which had been torn neatly in two.

JACK. 8 SILCHESTER ROAD. NOTTING HILL 4529.

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Unlike the other untidy scraps of paper in the wallet, this ticket had been carefully tucked away as if it relayed more than just a piece of information.

As if it meant more to the wallet’s owner than simply a name and an address.

The name of the worried-looking boy perhaps?

The Doctor gulped down the hot, gritty coffee and hurried out of the café, pausing only to raise his hat at the couple by the counter who were too busy kissing to notice him at all.

Jack Bartlett heard the door to the Fourth Magpie crash open, letting in a cold gust of night air. For what felt like the thousandth time, he glanced anxiously around hoping to see Eddy hurrying over, looking apologetic, with a tale of missed buses or having to work late.

It wasn’t Eddy. A short man in a strange tweed jacket stood in the doorway shaking the rain from his umbrella. Jack turned back to his pint of M&B.

Where was Eddy? It wasn’t like him to be late. In fact in the five weeks they had been seeing each other Eddy had always been early. More often it was Jack who turned up late and out of breath after hurrying down from the building site at Marylebone.

They had met outside Holborn library. Jack had been hurrying out guiltily, eager to be away from the librarian’s penetrating gaze after borrowing two Oscar Wilde’s and a James Baldwin. He had felt sure that the kindly-looking woman had been able to see straight into his mind: his choice of reading a window to the secrets hidden there. In his hurry to be away, he hadn’t been paying attention to where he was going and had run straight into someone on their way in. He’d spluttered apologies as he tried to gather up his fallen books before the newcomer could see what titles he’d borrowed. The stranger had picked up
Giovanni’s Room
before Jack had been able to retrieve it. Jack had immediately blushed beetroot.

Their eyes had met for the first time as they climbed to their feet. The dark-haired boy was so beautiful that Jack thought that he was going to be physically sick. Either that or just faint dead away. The boy was older than Jack, maybe seventeen or even eighteen, with dark blue eyes framed by long, black lashes.

‘This is by that American, isn’t it? The coloured writer?’ The boy asked, looking from the book in his hands to Jack. He suddenly grinned conspirato-rially. ‘It’s meant to be a bit racy, isn’t it?’

Jack had felt as if someone had just removed all of his clothes. He’d actually wrapped his arms around himself in an attempt to cover himself up. But the boy had just said that he hoped it lived up to its reputation, because he hated books which promised things that they didn’t deliver. Then he had looked at Jack intently, meaningfully, for a moment, as if waiting for him to 20

say something. Jack was suddenly scared that this beautiful boy was going to turn around, walk away and that would be it. And from somewhere deep inside of himself, Jack had somehow found the courage to ask the dark-haired boy if he wanted to go for a coffee and Eddy Stone had said yes.

They had seen each other every day since that afternoon. And for Jack, even that didn’t feel as if it were enough. Jack spent his days in the site office either staring into space or worrying that he was going to make some stupid blunder with Eddy and spoil everything. He barely got any work done, and had been twice reprimanded by the foreman for being late preparing the workmen’s wage packets. He didn’t care though, the only thing he cared about was Eddy.

But Eddy hadn’t turned up tonight. Jack looked balefully around the pub lounge. The Fourth Magpie had lost a lot of its charm since it’d been mod-ernized; the comfy settees and cut glass had been replaced with Formica and that new tubular furniture. Jack noticed that Madge, Eddy’s boss, was in one of the booths surrounded by her usual entourage of fawning middle-aged men. They were all laughing, sharing some joke of Madge’s. Madge often drank at the Fourth Magpie: Fred, the landlord, gave her free drinks. He liked having women in his pub, said that they brought respectability to the place.

Respectability and the guise of normality.

Jack had always felt intimidated by Madge. However, tonight his concern for Eddy overcame his usual inhibitions. Swilling the dregs of his fourth pint of beer, he climbed a little unsteadily from his stool at the bar and made his way over to the booth where Madge was holding court. She was in the middle of a story about her brief spell as a model back in the forties. ‘It was always the same,’ she was recounting, ‘bikinis in winter and furs in summer. That’s why I packed it in and concentrated on me hairdressing. Never knew whether I was coming or going.’

Her companions all nodded appreciatively, but Jack had heard them snipe about Madge behind her back too often to believe their sincere expressions.

Madge caught sight of him as he arrived at her booth. She sighed theatrically. ‘If it isn’t boy Bartlett. What do you want?’

Jack swallowed. ‘I’ve been waiting for Eddy. He was meant to meet me after he finished work, but he hasn’t shown up. I just wondered if. . . ’

‘Probably licking his wounds,’ she said, and turned to her audience. ‘I sacked the little sod this afternoon.’

‘What?’

‘You can tell Eddy Stone that he needn’t come sniffing around for his job back either. I’ll put up with a lot, but I’m not having my stylists mincing around my shop looking like girls.’

Jack couldn’t understand what Madge was saying. ‘You’ve sacked Eddy?

That’s crazy. What did he do?’

21

‘As if you don’t know. Came to work with his hair bleached blond.’ Madge sneered, her companions exchanged disapproving glances.

‘You sacked Jack because he dyed his hair? I don’t believe it.’ Jack felt an anxious anger rise up through him. How could Madge have done such a thing? How could you sack someone for dying their hair? Jack felt a nagging worry that somehow this was all going to turn out to be his fault. Jack often teased Eddy that he usually fancied lads with fair hair and that Eddy was not his usual type at all. Had his teasing caused Eddy to get the sack?