Part 26 (2/2)

Danny beamed with satisfaction. 'It wasn't entirely wasted then.'

'Extraordinary,' declared the Brigadier and sipped his tea.

The chugging sound altered in pitch and the cabin dipped for a second. The fish mobile swung freely from the drawing-pin that held it up.

'h.e.l.lo,' the Brigadier said. 'We're moving.'

He ignored Kate's protest and pulled himself off the bed.

From the window, he could see the water and a bank of green foliage sliding past. Still uncertain of his legs, he made his way, hand over hand, to the steps that led up on deck.

The little man with wild hair and a huge scruffy coat who was working the tiller came to attention as soon as he saw the Brigadier emerge.

'Sir. Glad to see you're all right, sir.'

Lethbridge-Stewart squinted in the sunlight at their unlikely pilot. Behind him, Kate was saying, 'Harrods saved you from the Chillys, Dad.'

The little man nodded. 'Bunch of hooligans, sir. The lad reckoned we were best off well away from them.'

'Thank you er... Harrods?'

'Sir,' he barked.

The Brigadier surveyed the ca.n.a.l banks. They were a ma.s.s of overgrown vegetation. The narrow boat was chugging west, away from the city. It occurred to him that after today's fiasco on the roads, this was the most reliable way to travel. It had been a sensible move to get away from trouble, even if he wasn't quite sure exactly where they were going.

The narrow boat looked in good shape, colourfully painted with troughs of daffodils set along the roof. But then that sort of orderliness was just what he would have expected from Kate. He liked to think she took after him in that respect.

Gardening was something he had never had time for as a soldier, but he'd kept a spruce patch in his quarters at Brendon, and once he'd retired, he was going to have a place with a large plot to indulge himself in. Above anything, he had always wanted an apple tree.

He glanced at Harrods again. The little tramp was still standing to attention. 'Army, aren't you?' the Brigadier observed. 'On your uppers?'

'RAF, sir. Flight Sergeant Haroldson. Squadron got disbanded, sir.'

That was a familiar enough story. The Brigadier could only sympathize. 'Like losing your family.' He noticed Kate's affectionate smile again and returned it with interest.

'Get called Harrods, sir, 'cos I'm fussy where I kip down.'

He had standards too. The Brigadier would far rather lead one man like Harrods than a hundred of the self-satisfied types that Cavendish represented. 'Thank you, Flight Sergeant.

Carry on.'

'Sir.'

With a look of approval, the Brigadier ducked back under the door. 'The company you keep's a real eye-opener, Kate.'

'I thought they were with you,' she said.

Danny snapped shut the lid of a metal trunk, but not before the Brigadier saw a jumble of coloured bricks and train tracks inside.

'We can't stay here, Brigadier,' the boy said urgently. 'The Intelligence is hunting us.'

'Both of us?' The Brigadier sat down on the bed again.

Under Danny's coat he glimpsed a green and yellow sweats.h.i.+rt. 'Aren't you one of these Chilly characters too?'

Danny was in earnest. 'New World's a front to bring the Intelligence back through. It's an evil spirit that got bound to the Earth.'

This was the sort of hok.u.m that the Doctor usually came out with, and he was usually right. Of course, the Doctor had never had to write an official report after the event. Over the years, Lethbridge-Stewart had become a dab hand at glossing down the sometimes unbelievable evidence of his own eyes for the upper echelons to read. This sort of talk took him right back to what they they now termed 'The Blunder Days'. He had learned to be a lot more open-minded during that era. Frankly, now termed 'The Blunder Days'. He had learned to be a lot more open-minded during that era. Frankly, they they didn't know what didn't know what they'd they'd missed. missed.

Daniel Hinton had certainly been a misguided nuisance when he was at school, but he had never been a liar. There was a distinct possibility that the boy was right. The Brigadier could remember some garbled explanation that the Doctor had given about trying to reverse the power on the Intelligence.

The blasted thing was defeated, not destroyed. But he and the Doctor were barely acquainted in those days and he'd never really understood the implications. As it was, he was working on his own now.

'Trust no one. Isn't that right, Danny? Not even my people at UNIT.'

Kate had been watching the two of them with a look of growing perplexedness. 'Just listen to you. Who do I call first?

Police, exorcist or psychiatrist?'

Danny ignored her. 'The whole city's fouled up. The computer Internet's virally infested.'

At last, the pieces were forming up together. The Brigadier looked to his pupil for confirmation. 'And that's the Intelligence's new body?'

Danny frowned almost apologetically. 'It won't stop there.'

This was not what the Brigadier wanted to hear. His daughter had been threatened and he refused to believe that some shapeless ma.s.s of malevolent thoughts that didn't even feasibly exist was carrying out a personal vendetta against him. No one had so much as seen any Yeti, even he had only imagined one. He was determined to find some other acceptable explanation. If he could, he would put it down to bad dreams after a toasted cheese supper, or too much nutmeg on one of Celia's rice puddings. The rest was just coincidence.

He looked at Danny's Chilly sweats.h.i.+rt and knew that he was fooling himself. That really annoyed him. Out of sheer perversity, he suddenly snapped, 'Nonsense. The Intelligence was driven out! I was there!'

'No!' exploded Danny. 'It's trapped. It can't break its link until all its old icons of power are destroyed. One icon still remains. The final Locus.'

'How do you know?' said Kate.

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