Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures [043] - Head Games by Steve Lyons

Author:Steve Lyons
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426204541
Publisher: Doctor Who Books
Published: 1995-12-14T23:00:00+00:00

14

The Bitch Is Back

20 January 1994. 7.59 a.m.

The older man had his arm around the woman’s neck. Her feet kicked out and found his shin. He dropped her and she twisted, knocking him aside. She seemed more interested in the guy behind him, the one with the blond hair and short pants.

She leapt for him.

And froze in mid-air.

8.55 p.m.

The picture raced backwards until the figures disappeared.

Will Beecham manipulated the controls and found their point of arrival. He paused the tape again. One frame, the café was empty – the next, it became a battleground. The image wavered, blurred by arrested motion.

He wondered if anyone had tampered with the film. He dismissed the notion immediately. What would be the point?

He watched the sequence again, in soundless monochrome, allowing it to run on. The time signature, a digital image in the screen’s bottom left corner, notched up another minute.

8.00 a.m.

The woman and her target crashed into tables and scattered chairs. The other – the older, shorter man with black hair and a question mark-patterned jersey – was on her, but she shrugged him of and drove her fist into his companion’s stomach. He doubled up in pain, and then both men were gone, as suddenly as they had arrived.

9.05 p.m.

Beecham blinked and the woman was gone too. The time signature still read 0800. The whole event had taken place in under a minute.

There had only been two people in the building: Ian and Lisa, in the kitchens. Two witnesses to the extraordinary incident. Even they had not seen much. ‘The woman shouted two words as she arrived,’ they had reported. ‘They sounded like “come from”.’

Nobody could work out what that might mean.

Beecham used the jog shuttle to spin the tape back and forth.

He was trying to read the lips of the intruders. He needed all this to make some sense. He wasn’t in luck.

He gave up on that segment. There was more to view. He was watching it all for the third time now.

He wound the tape on and pressed ‘play’. The screen lit up again with its rigid perspective of the café’s dining area. It took a moment’s twiddling for Beecham to locate the second occurrence.

His staff came into view on the monitor. They were tidying up, shuffling furniture to hide the fact that broken chairs had been removed. They would have to open up late today.

As if she was nothing but a conventional visitor, the woman arrived at 0914. She walked in through the street door this time.

9.14 a.m.

Dorothy McShane had decided to pay a visit to the café in Glebe; her first one since the Doctor had left.

She caught her reflection in the door glass above the CLOSED sign, dark hair tied back and trenchcoat drawn about her to hide the organic thing straddling her shoulders. The hopper’s breathing rippled the fabric of her fake backpack, but she hoped nobody would notice. The rebuilding in Paris, 1873, was going well and Dorothy had remembered her other responsibilities. A few

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