And you could never lose your family, though occasionally not for want of trying. Her and her mum could fight till the end of time, they’d still be each other’s back-up, always there.
But losing a friend. That was different. Friends were chosen purely on personality; a shared sense of humour; a sly glance; a joy in each other’s successes, uniting against anyone they felt had wronged them.
She found a cheap chain hotel by the river and checked in, hoping as she did so that her cards were working again, which they were. Then she went up to her rather basic room, and, feeling slightly ashamed, quickly had a little cry before bed, wondering if anyone ever felt truly like a proper, confident grown-up and, if they did, when would it happen for her?
Chapter
Four
Donna felt a little better in the morning. Nothing like a good cry and a fluffy towelling robe in a thin plastic bag. And two small biscuits next to a mini kettle. She took a long bubble bath and went down to breakfast still feeling puzzled and sad, but rather more resolute.
The Doctor was sitting in a wing chair in the corner, a large broadsheet newspaper covering his face.
The headline in the paper, in huge font, read ‘Concerning Increase in Sedentary Deaths’. The slightly more engaging headline in the tabloid he’d already read and discarded was emblazoned ‘THE TROLL HAUL – KEYBOARD WARRIOR MASSACRE’.
‘Morning,’ she said.
‘Morning,’ said the Doctor, lowering the paper with a concerned look on his face. He was wearing his glasses and a waiter had just put a vast cup of black coffee next to him.
‘What have I told you about drinking coffee?’
The Doctor glanced at it guiltily. ‘Best not?’
‘Best not. You go Full Tigger. Give it here.’
Donna dumped plenty of milk and a single sweetener in it. Then she looked at the sweetener, sighed, and added a whole spoonful of sugar.
The Doctor frowned and looked closer. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘What? Nothing.’
‘Why aren’t you staying at your friend’s?’
‘Because she’s a cow. Shut up. How was Kate Bush?’
The Doctor’s eyes went slightly misty for a moment. ‘She seems to have written rather a lot of songs about my life,’ he muttered gruffly. ‘Although it is entirely possible everybody there thought that.’ He pulled up another newspaper. ‘Did you see this?’
‘“Trip-Trapped Trolls”,’ Donna read. ‘That’s not a very nice headline.’
‘They keep finding dead people who were . . . prominent on the internet. And the papers seem to think it’s funny.’
Donna turned over the pages. ‘Cor, when did everyone get so nasty? Look, this guy had been sending horrible messages to women who said they were feminists. Telling them to jump in the sea and kill themselves and things!’
The Doctor squinted. ‘You’re a tiny species! Why the need to constantly sub-divide?’
Donna sighed. ‘I dunno. Is it Gwyneth Paltrow’s fault? It usually is.’
The Doctor squinted at the paper again. He rubbed the back of his hair. ‘Are they really all just having sudden heart attacks though? Young men? From too much sitting?’
‘Probably,’ said Donna. ‘Sitting, and getting angry and raising their blood pressure and not having girlfriends.’
The Doctor frowned. ‘But all of them . . . at their desks. Look. Two in Sydney. Four in Tokyo. One in Copenhagen . . . lots in San Francisco, and they all drink hemp juice and meditate out there . . .’
‘Your nose is twitching.’
‘I’m just saying. It’s outwith normal human statistical bounds.’
‘You think we should call the police?’
There was a pause.
‘Well, you know, looking at it from a certain angle, I am kind of the police.’
‘You’re not the police!’
‘I’ve got a box.’
‘You’re not the police!’
It was pointless. He’d already left.
‘This is why I have to put so much milk in my coffee,’ shouted Donna after him, standing up quickly, downing it in one, replacing the cup and running out of the door after him.
Chapter
Five
There was very little to see at the dingy apartment block belonging to Alan Tranter, the local victim, nearby in West London.
Overflowing recycling bins covered the meagre front gardens. A large woman – his neighbour – was standing outside with a sad yet slightly proud set to her jaw. She’d been interviewed by the local paper and local television, she announced to them. Then she added that obviously it was incredibly sad, obviously, and they all wanted privacy at this difficult time.
‘So you knew Alan?’ asked Donna.
‘Not well,’ said the woman, shaking her head. ‘The police were round before, you know. Before he passed. They warned him to stop harassing Georgie Malone.’
‘Who’s that?’ said the Doctor.
The woman squinted at him curiously.
Donna pulled on his coat. ‘Starlet,’ she hissed. ‘Famous for going to premieres in not a lot of clothes.’
‘Famous?’ said the Doctor. ‘That made her famous?’
‘Stop pretending you don’t read my Heat subscription,’ said Donna.
‘I . . . uh . . . OK.’
‘Excuse me,’ said the woman. ‘Only it’s chilly out here.’
‘Sorry,’ said the Doctor.
‘Well, like I said, he’d had the police round before for harassment.’ She sniffed. ‘We were surprised. He wasn’t a bad lad, you know, in himself. Quiet and that. Didn’t have a lot of friends.’
‘Figures,’ said Donna.
‘Donna!’ said the Doctor.
‘Well, it does, doesn’t it? If you’re all happy and loved up you’re not going to spend your life trying to make other people feel bad, are you?’
The Doctor shrugged.
‘But did he seem healthy?’ said Donna.
‘He was a big lad,’ said the woman. ‘Liked his food, know what I mean? Basically, the opposite of you.’ She pointed at the Doctor. ‘I mean, you look like you need feeding up, know what I mean?’ She grinned rather suggestively for a bereaved neighbour.
The Doctor coughed in embarrassment. ‘And his family?’
‘Just his mum,’ said the woman. ‘Treated her like a skivvy, he did. She’s inconsolable. So sad her baby boy’s dropped dead, you know.’
Donna nodded. She supposed it didn’t matter how big someone was or how inexplicable the way they behaved. They were still somebody’s baby.
‘We’re just going to take a look at his computer,’ said the Doctor. He had the psychic paper all ready, but the woman waved him on without bothering to glance at it.
‘He’s one of those dead trolls, innee?’ she said suddenly, an oddly eager tone in her voice.
The Doctor’s brow creased.
‘You know,’ the woman said. ‘My boy. My kid. He had to change schools because people were bullying him on the internet. Sending him horrible messages, all day, all night, all over his social media, because he were a little bit different. Just for the spite of it.’ She sniffed. ‘Good riddance to that sort, if you ask me. And I bet a lot of people agree with me.’
And she turned round and went back into her house, closing the door forcefully behind her.
Chapter
Six
The flat had a curious emptiness about it, even though Alan had only been dead for a day; an odd, empty aura, as if the space itself knew he was gone.
A bluebottle sat on the hall windowsill. Dust lay thick on surfaces which must have been there for a long time, and there was a heavy, shut-in scent of sweat and clothes that hadn’t been dried properly, and, Donna thought, sadness, but that may just have been her mood, and the circumstances in which they were there.
‘What if the real police turn up while we’re here?’ she said to the Doctor. ‘Can mine say Detective Chief Inspector on the paper? I’ve
always wanted to say that. Hello! I’m Detective Chief Inspector Noble. 100 wpm and licensed to fingerprint.’
‘Yup. If I can be the maverick copper who bends the rules and doesn’t respect authority but still gets results.’
‘You’d need a leather jacket.’
The Doctor winced.
Donna’s grin faded as they entered the small conversion. There were three rooms on the top floor of the building; a dirty kitchen with an unsorted bin overflowing with fast-food wrappers; a sad sitting room with nothing in it but a squeaky leatherette sofa with one huge indentation in it, obviously his normal seat, and a vast television unit, and, in the bedroom, which contained a single bed with a duvet but no duvet cover, two huge computer screens and an enormous CPU, still humming.
‘I thought the police would have taken this away.’
‘I’m not sure the police see it as a job yet,’ said the Doctor. ‘At the moment it’s a health issue. It isn’t a crime.’
‘At the moment,’ came a deep voice.
The Doctor and Donna whipped around. In the doorway was the silhouette of an extremely large man. He was almost bald, just a short razored suggestion of hair dirtying his scalp. His shoulders filled the doorway. He had a long black coat on, and a pair of wraparound sunglasses gave him a completely blank expression that did not suggest that levity would be a good approach. He also wore the kind of earpiece Donna associated with FBI agents in American films.
He stepped forwards slowly. ‘Seeing two strange people poking about, though. That makes it look more . . . interesting?’
‘Nothing strange about me,’ said the Doctor, as Donna shot him a look. ‘What?’ He strode forward. ‘Hi. I’m the Doctor.’
The tall man said nothing, simply grunted. ‘I’m here to remove the computer,’ he said, making a move towards it.
‘Are you from the police?’ said Donna.
He turned to her. ‘Are you?’
‘Umm, kind of?’
‘Well, surely you’d know, then,’ said the man calmly, carrying on.
He jerked the hard drive up, pulling out all the leads carelessly, and dumped the unit into a huge evidence bag.
Donna stepped forward, an eager look on her face. ‘Well, I’m Detective Chief Inspector—’
The Doctor stepped forwards and interrupted, much to Donna’s annoyance. ‘What are you looking for in that thing?’ he said, nodding to it. ‘Is it somewhere he’s been? Some site he’d been visiting?’
‘Not a clue,’ said the man. ‘Scuse me.’ He looked down at Donna. ‘Detective Chief Inspector.’
There was a stand-off in the room; a sudden nasty air of tension you could feel.
‘Unless,’ the man said suddenly, ‘you’d like to come down to the station with me?’
‘We would,’ said the Doctor, confident, as ever, in his ability to talk his way out of practically anything.
Behind the man, Donna was suddenly shaking her head furiously.
‘Or,’ said the Doctor, ‘we could come down and check on what you’ve done later. What?’ he hissed, but Donna still kept on shaking her head.
Before he could respond, the man pushed past them, and left the room, carrying the CPU and screens as though they weighed nothing at all, and vanished down the stairs.
‘Why couldn’t we go down to the police station?’ said the Doctor, watching behind him as the man disappeared, once again blocking the light from the stairwell as he heaved the bags outside and they prepared to follow him. ‘What’s your problem? We should either go . . .’
He watched the man leave by the front door and they stole carefully down the stairs.
‘ . . . or call his bluff. Which I reckon might be much more interesting. Do you see my cunning police instincts kicking in?’
Donna looked embarrassed and whispered something.
‘What?’
Donna mumbled but the Doctor heard without a problem.
‘You have unpaid parking fines?’
‘Excuse me! Who once left the TARDIS bang slap in the middle of the Old Kent Road for a fortnight when we went to the Great Exhibition?’
‘That’s not the point.’
They looked at one another.
‘Well, where do you think he’s going, then?’ said Donna.
They ran quickly down the rest of the stairs. But by the time they hit the entrance he’d vanished. There wasn’t a trace of him in either direction.
Some distance away – he moved with extraordinary speed when he had to – the huge bulk of a man took off his wraparound sunglasses and blinked. His irises weren’t brown or blue or hazel.
They were a dark yellow: the colour of pus.
Chapter
Seven
‘Mother and child parking? Donna.’ The Doctor’s face was entirely disapproving.
‘Oh come on, the amount of times they bark my ankles with their buggies, they deserve it.’ She thought for a moment. ‘He didn’t seem like the police.’ Something else struck her. ‘And he’s got all the stuff that was on those computers.’
The Doctor held up the sonic smugly. ‘Fortunately, he walked straight past me on his way out.’
‘Did you get it all in that?’
‘Every single bit. And I wiped the hard drive.’
Donna clapped her hands together. ‘That’s great!’
‘Unless he really is the police, of course,’ said the Doctor gloomily. ‘Then we could have done with his help.’
The Doctor had read the entire contents of the computer on Donna’s phone before her tea had cooled enough for her to sip it.
‘What’s on it?’ asked Donna. ‘What’s it like?’
The Doctor grimaced. ‘Like wading through sewage,’ he said. He looked out of the window at people passing by on the pavement, many of them engrossed in their phones even as they walked into others on the street. ‘What on earth is this compulsion . . . this desire to cause misery and shame for others in the internet?’
‘It’s just like throwing fruit at people in the stocks, innit?’ said Donna equably. ‘Not much changes.’
‘But it’s on such a vile scale now . . . attacking anything. Gender, clothing, weight . . .’
‘It’s just people who’ve done nothing with their lives trying to make themselves feel better by making other people feel worse.’
‘How does that even work?’ said the Doctor. ‘Does it work?’
‘Dunno,’ said Donna, who still felt on the receiving end after Hettie.
The Doctor looked down at the readout, then crossly deleted it all before handing it back to Donna. ‘I don’t want that filth contaminating . . . well . . .’ he said, frowning. ‘And now look at me, all tense and wound up.’
‘That’s just how it goes, isn’t it?’ said Donna gently. ‘It’s infectious, all that meanness. Tea normally helps. Do you want some more?’
‘This tea is amazing. Compared to yours, which is awful,’ said the Doctor. ‘Or am I still infected with mean?’
‘No,’ said Donna. ‘I make it terrible on purpose so I don’t have to make the tea all the time. Worked wonders when I was a temp.’
‘OK,’ said the Doctor, replacing the chipped Royal Doulton cup on the table. ‘So. The computer was fairly common or garden bile. But I think there’s more to it – and I think our oversized friend proved it simply by showing up – than just a simple heart attack. Give me your gizmo again.’
Donna obediently handed over her old phone. The Doctor sonicked it, then pulled up a screen on it and started rapidly making dots in it with his finger.
‘What are those?’ said Donna.
‘IP addresses. Most of them fake. But if you get in underneath them, it’s where the websites originate. The dark web, and the Silk Road and the layers under the normal layers.’
‘What normal layers?’
‘The sites you use. There’s a lot more going on below. You can peel the skin off the face of the worldwide web, Donna. And what sits underneath is very, very ugly.’
/>
Donna blinked. She glanced around the coffee shop to make sure nobody was watching them, but everyone was happily buried in their own screens, which was fortunate, as the Doctor had raised up some green light from the phone, and a fine, 3D Earth globe was now spinning around their faces.
Tiny numbers were converting into points of light that were shooting off in all directions, bouncing from territory to territory but all converging on the miniscule spot of West London. Gradually the dancing lights started to arrange themselves, changing colour as the Doctor went down and down through the encryption layers until, finally, there was a little pinging noise, and a small dot on the globe was blinking.
‘There we are!’ The Doctor squinted and pulled the globe a little larger, then pointed a finger at the spot. ‘Where is this?’
Donna looked blank.
The Doctor pressed more firmly with his finger and looked at her quizzically. ‘Donna, this is your home planet.’
‘Yeah, but . . . you know . . . geography class . . . boring?’ She tailed off.
The Doctor rolled his eyes and pulled it up further. ‘Well. South Korea it’s called now. Gunjaji Guk – “Land of Scholarly Gentleman”. Lovely place. Geumgangsan: “Land of Embroidered Rivers and Mountains”. Really, it’s quite fantastic.’
‘And that’s where that guy’s internet was going through?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘I’ve traced the other deceased’s computers too. They all point there.’
‘On my rubbish phone? When?’
‘You are human, you know. You can be a little slow at stuff.’
‘Now who’s trolling?’ Donna ran a finger around the pretty filigree of the light-pointed spinning globe. ‘You think we should go there instead of tracking down that guy who took the computers?’
‘If he was the police he’ll be right behind us.’ The Doctor paused. ‘And if he wasn’t . . . he’ll be right behind us.’
Doctor Who: In the Blood Page 2