Romana stood in the rather unpromising ruins of the Kerensky Accelerator, using her sonic screwdriver to conjure a vortex breach trigger out of some valves and a corkscrew. She had vastly increased the memory of the computer to almost a megabyte and the two of them were getting on marvellously. It was terribly interactive and provided an immediate response in seven computer languages and five protocols. She’d accelerated it until it was pretty much the prime computer on the planet. Clever prime, she thought. If it wasn’t for her headache and the fact that she kept having to step over the skeleton of the poor Professor, she would have said things were going swimmingly.
Duggan also wasn’t helping. Whenever she passed his cell he would growl ‘traitor’ at her, which struck her as pretty ungrateful. If he was trying to spoil her concentration, he had another thing coming. If she could put up with the Doctor, she could put up with anything. Actually, it was rather nice to have her own project.
Hermann came rushing down into the cellar, wearing a look almost of panic.
The Count was sitting, eating cheese and watching Romana with a smile of approval. Seeing Hermann’s expression, he burst out laughing. ‘The Doctor!’ he snapped jubilantly. ‘Here!’
Hermann frowned. ‘So I have just discovered.’
‘I knew it!’ The Count clapped his hands together with glee.
Romana couldn’t help but feel a little hurt, like an understudy who had thought they were going down a storm, only to see the star hobbling back into the limelight. All the same, she could do with a second opinion, and possibly cream off a bit of grudging praise for her solution.
Seeing she’d stopped work, the Count wagged a finger at her, then dotted up a stray crumb of gorgonzola. ‘Carry on with your work, my dear,’ he smiled. ‘You’re doing terribly well.’ He turned back to the butler. ‘So, we have a full house, do we? Excellent, Hermann, excellent. Ask him to step down here, would you?’ He turned back to Romana with a smile that was both generous and triumphant.
Yes, thought Romana, he’ll be very pleased with all we’ve done. She paused, suddenly uncertain. Won’t he?
* * *
The Doctor was splayed out in a library chair. He was spreading out across the library in a jumble-sale sprawl. Already he was quite at home, filling all of it with his scarf, piles of discarded books, and his boots propped up against a table which had been designed for better things. He’d only been in the library ten minutes. Imagine the chaos if he had sat there for a day, the Countess thought.
She’d invited him here in the hope of learning something about Romana, but the Doctor seemed determined to bat away all enquiries about her. Every now and then, the Doctor would drum his fingers on the arm of his chair impatiently and then flash the Countess a winning look. He was waiting for something, she thought, but what? He couldn’t possibly expect to leave here alive. What did this lunatic have up his sleeves? Blackmail? A weapon? Knowledge? He was definitely playing for time.
She ran through the options and drew a blank. What did the Doctor have? Nothing. But they had the Mona Lisa. There was really nothing they couldn’t do. Carlos and her.
‘Tell me . . .’ The Doctor seemed to have been suddenly struck by a thought. ‘How long have you been married to the Count?’
What a question! ‘Long enough,’ she replied, refusing to take offence.
‘“Long enough”? Oh, I do like that, discretion and charm,’ the Doctor beamed at her witticism. ‘So civilised. So terribly unhelpful.’
‘Discretion and charm.’ How perfectly he put things. ‘I could not survive without them. Especially in matters concerning the Count.’ She felt she’d evoked the right level of enigma about her husband. But also, a worry: had she somehow given something away?
‘There is such a thing as being discreet.’ The Doctor steepled his fingers and rested his chin on them thoughtfully. ‘There is also such a thing as being wilfully blind.’
‘Blind!’ She hooted with laughter. ‘I help him steal the Mona Lisa, the greatest crime of the century—’
‘The Mona Lisa?’ the Doctor muttered. For some puzzling reason, he had underlined the ‘the’. Why, what other one was there?
‘Exactly!’ she retorted. ‘And you call me blind?’
‘Yes!’ The Doctor sat up in his chair, a thundering cascade of movement. ‘You see him as a great master criminal, an art collector, an insanely wealthy man. And it suits you to see yourself as his consort. But tell me this . . .’ He paused, lethally. ‘What’s he doing in the cellar?’
That floored her. She hesitated.
The cellar had long been a bone of contention between the two of them. ‘I’ll show you when it’s ready, my dear’ or ‘Perhaps tomorrow. Not today,’ and ‘Hermann says it would be a bad idea to disturb the Professor right now.’ Just to underline that Hermann was a frequent visitor, an insider on some project that she was best kept out of. It had always niggled her. But how could the Doctor possibly know that? She shifted in her chair. It suddenly felt uncomfortable. Maybe it was time to have it reupholstered.
‘Oh, he’s tinkering, that’s all.’ She wafted the Doctor’s question away. ‘Every man must have a hobby.’
‘Man?’ The Doctor was deadly grave. ‘Are you quite sure about that?’
‘What?’ The Countess tried to laugh, but her mouth was dry. ‘I . . .’
The Doctor was on his feet now, striding around the library. Wherever he went, little turrets of books went toppling. ‘A man, yes,’ he sneered, ‘but with one eye and green skin?’ He did an absurd mime.
The Countess tried to laugh again. Nothing happened.
The Doctor was in full flow. ‘Ransacking the treasures of history to pay for the time machine he hopes will reunite him with his people, the Jagaroth?’
Finally the laugh came. She dismissed him completely.
But the Doctor didn’t seem to notice. His tone was scornful. ‘And you never noticed a thing? How discreet. How charming.’
That should have pulled her up, and indeed it gave her pause for thought, but really this man was too much. How shriekingly funny.
Hermann entered, coughing politely. ‘Excuse me, my lady, but the Count is very anxious to see the Doctor in the cellar.’
Good, she thought. That would be the last she heard of him.
The Doctor nodded farewell to her. ‘Think about it, Countess.’ He pointed to an imaginary dot in the centre of his forehead. ‘Think about it.’ He bowed, and seemed so sad.
Left alone, the Countess continued to laugh. All this, this château, this wealth, this view, this achievement—all of it conjured up by something that you’d pan fry with garlic? What a wonderful world it was to have such madmen in it.
And then, the Countess closed the curtain, stopped laughing and turned away, chewing on the edge of her cigarette holder. She tried to light a cigarette, but her hand was trembling.
Although the Doctor had gone, the room still seemed full of him, somehow.
She crossed to the fireplace where a little blaze was crackling away. She noticed the flowers on the mantelpiece had died. How sad. They’d been so pretty yesterday. She plucked the heads off the roses and dropped them into the fire, one by one. They burned surprisingly well, sending little puffs of smoke up the chimney.
Struck by a thought, the Countess weaved her way through the scattering of books, reaching up to slide back a panel that Carlos didn’t think she knew about. But of course she did. She knew everything.
Behind the panel was another ancient book. Only it wasn’t a book at all. A hermetically sealed fake. Inside it was a sealed plastic bag. Inside that was an ancient oilcloth parcel. Inside the oilcloth were some scraps of parchment.
One piece of parchment really didn’t look that impressive. Well, not until you realised it was the original design sketch for the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Somehow it had survived the sacking of the li
brary of Alexandria. Nestled atop of it was a tourist trinket given by Champollion to the Emperor Napoleon. Aged up to look ancient, but really little more than a tracing of a temple frieze. It depicted Horus, Isis, Ra and, at the end of the frieze, the figure that had somehow struck her as odd when she’d first seen it, so odd she’d felt the bracelet tingle on her arm. It was an image that, for no good reason, her subconscious had never let her forget.
It was the figure of an Egyptian god with one eye and green skin.
The Countess sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands.
16
GOODBYE, NOT AU REVOIR
The Doctor glided into the cellar like a galleon at full sail. Hermann’s gun didn’t matter; the skeleton in the corner didn’t bother him at all. He stopped halfway down the steps, waited until he had everyone’s attention, and then swept into the laboratory, waving to everyone. ‘Ah, Count, hello. I wonder if you could possibly spare me a moment of your time? Romana! Hello! How are you? I see the Count’s roped you in as a lab assistant, eh? What’s that then? What are you making for him?’
The Doctor hit pause in his promenade, smiling at her. Expecting a response.
Romana, holding up a triumph of solid-state micro-welding, sucked her lip, and felt oddly guilty. ‘Er,’ was all she managed.
‘Is it perhaps a model railway?’ prompted the Doctor. ‘Or a Gallifreyan Egg Timer? I do hope you’re not making him a time machine because I shall be very angry if you are.’
Romana’s confidence stumbled. She looked worried and started to make very vague placatory noises.
But the Count cut across, every inch the genial host. ‘Ah, Doctor! How delightful to see you again. Why, it seems only four hundred and sixty years since we last met.’
‘Four hundred and seventy four,’ the Doctor corrected, convivially. ‘Indeed. I always find the weather so much more pleasant in the early part of the sixteenth century, don’t you? Where’s Duggan?’
‘The Englishman?’ The Count snorted and jerked a thumb towards the storeroom. ‘In there.’
Duggan’s face appeared at the grille in the door. He looked as dejected as a lost dog in a cage.
‘Hello, Duggan!’ the Doctor greeted him like an old friend.
‘Doctor, get me out of here.’
‘I do hope you’re behaving yourself. Good, good.’ The Doctor dismissed all thoughts of Duggan from his mind. He needed the room. ‘Now Count, what I’ve come here to say is that, if you’re by any chance trying to go back in time, you’d better forget it.’
‘Oh? Why do you say that?’ smiled the Count pleasantly, as though told it might rain.
‘Because I’m going to stop you,’ the Doctor pronounced gravely.
‘On the contrary.’ The Count waved this away as jovially as if someone had said they’d better not have another drink. ‘You’re going to help me.’
‘Am I?’
‘Oh, indeed you are, Doctor.’ The Count treated him to his widest, most celebratory smile. ‘And if you do not, it will be very much the worse for you, for this young lady, and for several thousand other people I could mention if I happened to have a Paris telephone directory in front of me.’
Romana looked alarmed, but the Doctor had been down this road so many times he knew which service stations to avoid. ‘You know, that sort of blackmail won’t work on me, Count, because I know what the consequences would be if you got what you wanted. I’m afraid I can’t let you fool around with time.’
‘Whatever else do you ever do?’ The Count looked hurt.
‘Ah, well, yes, but,’ began the Doctor, ‘I’m a professional. I know what I’m doing.’ He considered pausing for effect, and then saw that Romana was about to say something rather unhelpful. ‘I also know what you’re doing, Count. Romana, put down that equipment.’
‘Doctor,’ chided Romana, ‘it’s all right. He only wants to get back to his spaceship and reunite himself.’
‘PUT IT DOWN!’
Romana winced. The Doctor had never shouted at her before. Irritated with him beyond measure, she slammed the equipment on the desk.
The Count hastily snatched it up, examining it like a rare jewel. His face shone with pure delight. ‘Doctor, as entertaining as this is, I think we can dispense both with your help and your interference. Your friend has done her work very well indeed.’
Romana couldn’t help smiling. Until she saw the Doctor’s face. He was angry. End of the world angry. The Doctor made a clumsy attempt at knocking the device from the Count’s hands, but Hermann made a brutally efficient attempt at knocking the Doctor to the floor.
The Count tutted down at the Doctor and waggled Romana’s device at him.
‘Count.’ The Doctor started to pick himself up. ‘Don’t you realise what will happen if you take yourself back out of human history?’ His voice was very grave.
‘Yes.’ For once, the Count didn’t treat it as a joke. He looked around the cellar, and he may as well have been surveying all eternity. ‘Yes I do. And I don’t care one jot.’ He smiled, but this time there was precisely no humour in the smile. ‘Hermann,’ he said, pocketing the device, ‘lock them up. They shall stay there long enough to watch my departure. After that . . .’
Hermann bowed curtly and turned to the Doctor with a gleam in his eyes.
‘Kill them in whatever way takes your fancy,’ the Count announced. He climbed the stairs feeling suddenly weary. ‘I must make my farewells to the Countess.’ With a wave of his hand, the Count was gone.
* * *
It would be unfair to say that the Count had a list. But he took a long route back to the library, saying farewell to a few favourite works of art. Ones that perhaps hadn’t found their fans, but that were, in their own way, very dear to him. He’d spent the last day eating some of his favourite meals. He’d drunk some truly exquisite wines, he’d made sizeable inroads into the vintage champagnes, and really, really made the most of his last hours on Earth. Once he’d realised that was what they were.
Now he just had to say goodbye to his wife and have one final glass of that brandy he’d last drunk with Napoleon. Luckily, both the brandy and the Countess were in the same place. Jauntily tossing Romana’s device in the air, he strode into the library, his most exuberant smile on his face.
The Countess was pointing a gun at him and had been crying.
Alors. How trying.
‘My dear?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.
‘Close the door.’ Her voice and her grip on the gun were shaking. The Count regarded both with a little alarm. The gun was one of his best inventions. Ironically, considering the position he was now in, he had invented it as an efficient way to shut these creatures up and stop them from bothering him. Ah well, what was it that man had once said? ‘Hoist by your own petard.’ Yes. Quite.
Weapons came in and out of fashion. The pikestaff, the arrow, the mace, even the petard, all were languishing a little. But the gun really had proved to be the little black dress of weapons. Over the years it hadn’t changed that much. It had become faster and more efficient and that was about it.
He could have progressed weapons a bit further. But he’d pretty much stopped at the gun because he had invented something that could kill him with ease. One thing he’d learned about humanity. They could be so terribly ungrateful.
The Count had, of course, been held at gunpoint before. But that had always been fine. He’d greeted it with sang froid because he’d believed himself to be immortal, he’d believed himself to be the most important person on the planet, working to change the world for ever. He’d recently learned that all of this was true, but also, well, tricky.
His other fragments were, if you wished, immortal. He was not. He was the very final fragment of the very last of the Jagaroth. He now knew he was impossibly precious and, for once, he felt vulnerable.
Especially whe
n confronted by his wife with a gun. If it had been a hoodlum, a heavy or a thug then that could have been got around. They were probably threatening him because they wanted some pieces of paper or something shiny. But no. The Countess was pointing a gun at him because she was angry. And angry people did very silly, regrettable, messy things.
The Count had never been angry in his life. People got angry because they didn’t get their own way. The Count had never had this problem. If people were in his path, he simply removed them. However he had to.
And now he was stood in the doorway, staring in alarm at his wife. He realised he had licked his lips nervously. (How do I do that? he wondered. No, not now.)
‘Close the door,’ she repeated.
He did so. For once he had to force a smile. So. Just the two of them in the library. This might not end well.
‘What are you?’ she snapped hoarsely.
‘I beg your pardon?’ As pithy comebacks went, it really was below par, but he reasoned that, on this one occasion, he could be allowed a handicap.
She came forward, step by step across the carpet. Now he was almost at point-blank range. Well, that was not good.
‘What have I been living with all these years?’ she shrieked. Her voice was hoarse and dry. Regrettable. So much emotion. He had expected better of her. Especially as, one of the many uses of the bracelet he had given her was to suppress these nagging worries. He had found it terribly helpful over the years. His other fragments had discovered that, unless you were Pope, not being married aroused more questions than was entirely helpful. And so the bracelet had come about. Its low-level hypnotic field induced susceptibility and devotion, without, after a few refinements, making the poor things as docile as cattle. He so liked them to have independence and character. Heidi had delivered both in spades. And now, rather too well. What an alarming turn of events. He rather suspected the Doctor’s hand in this.
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