Doctor Who: City of Death (2015) by Douglas Adams & James Goss

Author:Douglas Adams & James Goss [Adams, Douglas & Goss, James]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous, Science Fiction, General, Action & Adventure, Fiction
ISBN: 9780698412286
Google: k_n3CAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-05T11:00:00+00:00

* * *

The Louvre was not the only art gallery broken into that night. About ten minutes’ walk from the Eiffel Tower is a street full of galleries, the kind that sells cheap fakes to expensive tourists.

Skilled hands saw to a lock and deactivated both alarms in seconds. M. Bertrand’s gallery was crammed full of absurd things at absurd prices. Thieves can tell a lot about a Paris gallery by the number of alarms it has. Two systems says that there’s nothing really worth stealing and you may as well not bother picking the lock. In this case, M. Bertrand was playing the thieves at their own game. There was actually a fabulously valuable Barbara Hepworth sculpture at the back, but as he’d had to get permission from the council to take a wall down to fit it in, he wasn’t that worried about thieves stealing it.

The intruder did pause to admire the Hepworth. He even stroked it gently. He was perhaps the only person in Paris who could have removed it without knocking a wall down. But no.

Instead he worked his way carefully through the gallery, torch playing over various paintings. Some watches melting in deserts were clearly derivative. Several early impressionist works were clearly fakes. And some of the string-and-twine sculptures screamed ‘bought from a bric-a-brac stall’. The thing that drew the thief was the new exhibit.

M. Bertrand had failed to notice the new exhibit. If he had he would have screamed in surprise while hastily scribbling out a price ticket. The truth was that M. Bertrand’s long lunch yesterday had been so long it had lasted until the following morning. He’d crawled in so late he’d barely had time to drink an espresso and shrug before heading out for lunch again. Because of this, M. Bertrand had entirely missed his remarkable new exhibit.

The intruder did not. He was only mildly distracted by the need to return and admire the Hepworth again. Other than that, he more or less made a beeline for the new exhibit.

It was a blue box, well over two metres high by about a metre wide. M. Bertrand would have been delighted by it, partly because it was such an unusual thing. When he’d been in London in the 1960s, they were everywhere. Police boxes were a convenient way for policemen to phone the station, while giving them somewhere handy to have their sandwiches and store their criminals (so long as the criminals didn’t eat their lunch). With the rise of the radio and the sandwich bar, the police box had gradually been phased out. Which was a shame, as there was something about the sheer boxiness and the blueness of it and the words ‘Police Box’ that made the box really so very reassuring. Plus the fact that it hummed to itself.

Not that every police box hummed to itself. Just this one. It was a happy little ‘all’s well with the world’ hum which sometimes, it had to be said, seemed very much at odds with the things going on around it.

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