There was no sound, at least none that carried across the atrium. It was just that he crumpled suddenly to the floor and Amy knew, without having to be told, that he was dead.
Chapter
4
They ran round to the opposite side of the atrium as quickly as they could. By the time they got there and found the right office, the man’s secretary had already covered his face with a coat. She was standing, shell-shocked, by the body.
‘Doctor,’ hissed Amy, ‘I saw something. I don’t know what happened but it was like… he pressed something on his wrist, a watch maybe, and then he just died.’
‘Overwork,’ said Vanessa Laing-Randall firmly.
‘I’m sad to say Doctor Schmidt that, however much we encourage our staff to take breaks, sometimes they just refuse. Isn’t that right, Jane?’
Jane Blythe, the assistant, jumped slightly with surprise at being addressed, but recovered her composure enough to blurt out, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ She consulted her smartphone. ‘Twenty-three per cent of our staff refused to use up holiday allowance last year.
Mr…’ she clicked a couple of buttons, ‘Brian Edelman here hasn’t taken a day’s holiday in eighteen months.
That’s strictly against our advice, Doctor Schmidt, we’ve sent him several emails about it.’ She noticed they were all staring at her. ‘That is, sorry, that’s what I’ve got in my records.’
The Doctor looked down grimly at the dead body.
‘Perhaps all those emails got caught in his spam filter.
Vicious things, spam filters. I knew one that became sentient once: made a killing holding everyone’s emails to ransom. Hmm. Did you say he was looking at his watch?’
The Doctor knelt down and gently pulled away the coat to examine the man’s wrists. There was no watch on either of them.
‘Well, I thought I saw—’
‘You were on the other side of the building, Ms Pond,’
said Vanessa. ‘I’m sure it was just a nervous gesture.’
‘Yeeeees,’ said the Doctor. ‘Nervous, yes. I wonder how a man in his position, so short of time, ever managed without a watch. Well! In the light of this incident, Vanessa Laing-Randall, Head of the London Office, I think my assistant and I will have to stay a bit longer, conduct a more thorough investigation, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Oh but,’ Jane consulted her smartphone, ‘only half a day was scheduled in and…’ Vanessa scowled at her.
‘Yes of course, absolutely, we can arrange that. Sorry.’
Vanessa put an encouraging hand at the Doctor’s back and guided him away from the body of poor Brian Edelman.
‘It’s a terribly shocking incident. Nothing like this has happened before, Doctor Schmidt. Perhaps you’d like to come out for lunch to get over it? Somewhere
comfortable and… well, the Ivy will always find a table for me.’
The Doctor spun on his heel, jerking away from Vanessa’s arm.
‘Lunch? Lunch is for wimps! I’ve always wanted to say that, actually I quite like lunch. But we don’t need lunch, do we Pond?’
‘We…’
‘That’s right! Lunch is for wimps and we are people of action! So! I think you can go and talk to some managers on the same level as poor Brian Edelman here. I’m sure Jane can arrange that, can’t you, Jane, don’t bother to answer that, insulting to you to ask really. I think it’s vitally important that Amy find out what pressure those middle-managers are under and,’ he leaned close to Amy, whispering in her ear so that no one else could hear, ‘what kind of watches they wear.’ He stood up straight and spoke more loudly: ‘I meanwhile will shadow you, Vanessa Laing-Randall, because I rather think that you might be doing something quite interesting. Not to say… dangerous and immoral.’
Vanessa Laing-Randall blinked. ‘I’ve got a meeting with clients from PZP Group, if that’s what you mean?
I’d hardly call it dangerous.’
‘That,’ said the Doctor, linking arms with Vanessa, and leaving Amy with Jane, ‘is exactly what I do not mean! But come along anyway, to the meeting, no time to lose, eh?’
Down in the mailroom, Rory was also coming face to face with the harsh realities of City life. Mostly those realities were: there was too much to do, there was too
little time to do it in, too many people were shouting, and too many of them were shouting at him.
‘Come on, Rory,’ someone shouted. ‘Shift yourself!
All those parcels on the noon courier to Rome or you’ll be for the chop!’
‘Get moving, Rory!’ shouted someone else. ‘One thousand reports to deliver to every desk in the building in the next hour and no one else to do it!’
‘Get over here, Rory!’ shouted another angry voice.
‘These pallets aren’t going to unload themselves, you know!’
Rory sighed. He was in a large basement room with another ten men, all labelling, packing, chatting to delivery drivers, filling out forms. He’d thought this was supposed to be the electronic age but there were still a lot of non-electronic parcels to be picked up or sent round the world. This wasn’t the kind of excitement he was used to, travelling with the Doctor. Still, to be honest, this all felt quite a lot safer than usual. Maybe if he could just catch up on the backlog of work…
‘Shift yourself, Rory. Chancellor of the Exchequer’s giving a speech tomorrow - if we don’t get those chairs up to the ground floor, what’s anyone going to sit on?’
There was something odd, though. He’d noticed that lots of the packages were coming from just one or two offices. This ‘Andrew Brown’ was sending out a lot. And another name kept coming up: ‘Sameera Jenkins’.
Dean, the stocky man working next to him and constantly whistling in a way that Rory was sure wouldn’t get irritating at all if you worked with him for years, was friendly enough.
‘D’you notice,’ Rory began, ‘how many of these
parcels come from Andrew Brown and…’
‘Sameera Jenkins?’ said Dean. ‘Oi, John. Rory wants to know why Brown and Jenkins are making ten times as much work as anyone else in the building.’
John, the short broad-shouldered supervisor, chuckled.
‘You’re not the only one, Rory my son.’
John and Dean exchanged a look.
Rory waited for them to say more, but they didn’t.
He knew he was on to something. Maybe he, Rory, could stop this bank collapsing! It wasn’t like Amy saving an entire planet from a plague of killer ladybirds (she claimed) or the Doctor saving the whole history of the universe on Tuesday using just a rubber band and a tin of pineapple rings (he’d idly dropped that into a conversation, claiming they couldn’t remember it because they’d been caught up in the whole fruit-salad-implosion too), but hey, it’d be something.
So he listened to the conversation around him, hoping to pick something up. John and Dean exchanged gossip about the Bank. Vanessa Laing-Randall, it turned out, had a hairdresser to blow-dry her hair in her office twice a day, morning and afternoon. She was ruthlessly ambitious - had appeared out of nowhere about six months ago, appointed from Hong Kong the rumour was - and workload in the London office had increased steadily since then. Andrew Brown and Sameera Jenkins were known to be arch rivals for a promotion. For a while Sameera had been a dead cert, but recently - no one knew why - Andrew was pulling ahead. Someone else claimed to know, for certain, that one of the most senior men in the building had been on two business
trips at the same time - one to Tokyo and one to New York. And no, he didn’t mean ‘one after the other’ - he’d had meetings in Tokyo in the morning, then New York in the afternoon. He must have been on a plane all the time!
Or, thought Rory, he knew one man who could be in Tokyo one minute and New York the next. A suspicion was starting to form in Rory’s mind. He couldn’t have said what it was any more clearly than ‘something weird is going on’ - but once you’ve been around ‘something weird’ long enough, you start to be ab
le to smell it.
‘Does anyone have any idea what’s going on with Andrew Brown and Sameera Jenkins?’ Rory said.
John and Dean exchanged one of those meaningful looks again.
‘If you want to know about that,’ said John, ‘maybe you need to look in Storeroom F. Just a sec.’ The phone next to John’s workstation was ringing. He glanced down at it. ‘What a surprise, his lordship Andrew Brown on the phone.’ He picked up the receiver.
‘What’s in Storeroom F?’ asked Rory. This sounded like the kind of interesting-if-scary thing that could lead to an adventure he could impress Amy with.
Dean nudged Bob, the skinny man standing next to him. ‘Our Rory here wants to know about Storeroom F,’
said Dean.
A grin spread across Bob’s face. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some boxes need to go to Storeroom F.
And I need some envelopes from right at the back.’
‘It’s your lucky day,’ said John, finished with his phone call. ‘We don’t usually let junior staff in there, do we?’
Rory could feel his skin prickling with excitement.
There was something in that room, he could feel it.
Til go,’ he said quickly. ‘You don’t need to worry about me, I’m trustworthy.’
‘That is a load,’ said John, pulling a key labelled ‘Storeroom F’ from his pocket and tossing it to Rory, ‘off my mind.’
Rory stood with the trolley full of boxes outside Storeroom F. The door didn’t look any different to Storerooms A-E and G-J. Except that it was locked. The others weren’t locked - he’d tried some of the handles.
He pulled out the key and unlocked it. As he touched the handle, he felt something like a tiny electric shock but softer, not painful. Probably just static electricity, he told himself. He opened the door. It was dark inside, and the storeroom seemed to go back a long way. Further than the others? Hard to know.
He pushed the trolley into the storeroom and reached for the light switch. As his hand groped, there was that strange sensation again. Like a tingling. And there was a sound in the room too, like a low fluttering hum.
With some relief, his hand found the switch. Flicked it.
Nothing happened. Great. No light.
He considered for a moment just unloading the trolley in the entrance of the room and forgetting about the envelopes Bob needed. But if he did that they’d all laugh at him. He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and pointed the faint glow from the screen around the room. Just enough to see by. He pushed his trolley a few more paces into Storeroom F. Though he hadn’t touched it, the door slammed shut behind him.
And there was that fluttering sound again, like a sigh.
Rory found he was breathing rapidly. When had that happened? He wanted to run out of the door and back to the mailroom where everything was light and cheerful.
He tried to calm down, breathed deeply, forced himself to scan the room slowly with the faint light from his mobile phone. It was an ordinary storeroom, just like the one they’d left the TARDIS in, he told himself. Look, there was a filing cabinet, there were shelves filled with boxes of printer paper, and… wait, what was that? It was the noise again. Like someone riffling through a phonebook.
He whirled round and pointed his dim light at the place the noise had come from. Something moved, just out of his line of vision, he spun round again, now he couldn’t tell which way he’d come into the room and right by his ear something chuckled, a single, mirthless laugh.
He let out a yelp, ran blindly forward, tripped over his own trolley sending boxes flying. The mobile phone flew out of his hand and clattered to the floor.
He sprawled on the floor. His heart was hammering in his chest. Something was moving in this room, making that occasional low fluttering noise. He tried to breathe more slowly. He looked around, straining his eyes in the dark to make anything out. He could see the faint glow of his phone a little way away. He crawled towards it.
Something plucked at his jacket, as if trying to hold him back. There was the chuckle again, a little further away.
The phone light blinked off.
The room was pitch dark again. He could hear movement. Slow, steady movement. Like something
blind was groping for him. He reached his hand forward… and with a flood of gratitude closed it around his mobile. He turned on the light, swept it in a broad circle. There was nothing there.
Keeping his back to the wall, he made his way round slowly to the door. He didn’t care about the envelopes.
He didn’t care about anything. He just wanted to get out. He reached down and grasped the handle. Turned it. The door was locked. His heart started to hammer again.
He dialled Amy’s number.
‘Amy,’ he hissed, ‘you’ve got to get down here right now. I’m in Storeroom F. Come quickly. Help me.’
‘But I - ‘
‘I’m locked in,’ he hissed. ‘Help me.’
He swept the light across the room again, and there was the movement. Something was moving by the far files. It wasn’t a person, although it was person-shaped.
In fact, woman-shaped. In fact, a woman who looked quite a lot like a younger version of the tramp they’d met outside the Bank. But he could tell it wasn’t a real person because he could see straight through her. He felt a prickling all over his body.
The see-through woman walked up to a row of books on the back wall. Picked one up. Flicked through it, making a riffling sound. Smiled. And then… vanished.
And reappeared right next to him, giving one short chuckle. He jumped, yelped, but she didn’t notice. She did the same thing again. Walked to the row of books, flicked through, disappeared.
And then again. And then again.
It was only when she’d done it four or five times that
Rory remembered that he still had the key to the door in his pocket and let himself out.
Trembling, Rory stood at his workstation. John, Dean and Bob were laughing quietly in a corner. In a moment he’d join them and laugh too about the hilarious joke they’d played. Find out what they thought was going on in Storeroom F. But not quite yet. The phone rang, he answered it unthinkingly.
‘Hello! Hello, is that the mailroom? It’s Andrew Brown.’
He didn’t have to say. The high-tech phone system not only brought up Andrew Brown’s name on the screen but also a little picture of him.
‘Mailroom,’ said Rory.
‘Now listen, I’m expecting a very urgent package of documents to arrive from Stockholm by courier, and its vital they be brought up as soon as they get here, do you understand?’
Across the room, another man was shouting at John.
At least, it must have been another man. Surely.
‘Do you have a twin brother, Mr Brown?’ said Rory.
‘What kind of a ridiculous question is that? I’ve got one sister if you must know, but I don’t see how that’s…’
Rory looked down at the little picture next to the name ‘Andrew Brown’ on his phone, and then back across at the near-hysterical man shouting at Bob.
‘And are you wearing a blue tie today, with a…’ Rory squinted… ‘a splash of egg on it?’
On the other end of the line there was a silence, and then: ‘Oh god, yes, there is egg on my tie. Thank you so
much for telling me, but how did you…’
Rory stared across the room again and then back down at the telephone. The man with the yellow splash of egg on his blue tie was still shouting - something about a document he needed photocopied urgently about ‘tax implications in Delaware’?
‘Oh, no reason,’ he muttered. ‘No reason at all.’
‘I didn’t ask the reason, I asked…’
But Rory wasn’t listening. As Andrew Brown spoke into his ear from his office on the fifth floor, he’d become very sure indeed that Andrew Brown was also standing across from him in the mailroom. Something weird was, indeed, going on.
Chapter<
br />
5
‘Doctor, what are you doing?’
The Doctor paid no attention. While Rory was trying to get to grips with the challenges of the mailroom, the Doctor was crouching in the corner of the very large, very plush conference room, furnished in mahogany with a carpet so thick that it came over the Doctor’s shoes. In the middle of the room was a huge lacquered wooden table. The people sitting around the table were watching with some confusion as the Doctor, sonic screwdriver and a small black knobbly device in his hand, scanned along the edge of the carpet, then up the middle of the windows, then around the drinks cabinet.
‘Doctor,’ said Vanessa Laing-Randall, ‘we’re all waiting to start the meeting so if you.
The Doctor looked at the small black knobbly device, which beeped rapidly and made a grinding noise. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Tachyon particles! Loads of them.
What year is this again?’
‘What…?’
‘Yes, what year, hurry please, we haven’t got all day or…’ the Doctor shook the small black knobbly device, ‘maybe we have… maybe we’ve got much more time than we could possibly use. What year did you say this was?’
‘I didn’t. It’s 2007. But Doctor, we do have to start this meeting now, you see time is running short and…’
‘From the look of these readings, time running short isn’t the problem at all. But now 2007, 2007… that’s very bad news. Shouldn’t get this sort of reading unless one of you has a…’ He bent his rubbery face into a grimace, then a frown. ‘But no, couldn’t be that, none of you has enough arms. Excuse me!’ he shouted to the puzzled-looking executives around the boardroom table. ‘Any of you carrying a temporal inhibitor?’
The executives looked at each other, then back at the Doctor with blank faces.
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