Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead (13 page)

BOOK: Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead

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‘Bless my soul!’

The sun was shining, it was a perfect summer’s day, and the old house in the valley below was indubitably Brendon School. The Brigadier laughed. ‘Goodbye, Doctor.’ He shook his old friend by the hand. ‘If ever you’re passing...’

The genial smile disappeared from his face. ‘Where’s Turlough?’

‘Turlough!’

In all the excitement the boy had been entirely forgotten.

‘He left in the capsule...’ said the Doctor, trying to remember the complicated sequence of events.

‘He can’t have,’ interrupted Nyssa. ‘If the Brigadier was still on the ship, he never used the transmat capsule.’

‘We’ve left him behind!’ shouted Tegan, already racing towards the TARDIS. ‘Come on. That ship’s on auto-destruct!’

The last thing Tegan expected to see as she rushed into the control room was Turlough. But there he was, leaning over the console, as if trying to set the co-ordinates.

‘I’m hard to get rid of.’ He smiled.

All Tegan’s suspicions about the boy came flooding back. ‘So it seems,’ she replied icily.

‘Turlough!’ The Doctor was equally amazed to see the boy in the TARDIS.

Turlough looked at him somewhat quizzically for a second or two. ‘May I join your crew, Doctor?’

‘I think you already have,’ said the Doctor.

It was quite normal for a pupil to disappear from Brendon School. Boys absconded; boys were expelled; boys were summoned to rejoin parents in Qatar and Addis Ababa; boys, these days, were even arrested. The Headmaster was remarkably unpeturbed to learn that Turlough had been removed. He was, however, only too relieved that nothing untoward had happened to the Brigadier. In fact, he couldn’t remember when he last saw old Lethbridge-Stewart looking so well.

The Brigadier, wearing his Bursar’s hat, assured the Headmaster that there was no question of Turlough’s fees being refunded (all monies at Brendon payable in advance) and replied to Mr Sellick’s observation on his excellent health that he felt like a new man.

There had been a message, waiting for him in the staff room, that a retired mechanic living in the village, had fallen in love with the vintage Humber languishing in the local garage, and had offered to put the old girl on the road again.

The Brigadier was quite bucked, and it was with a light heart that he strolled, later that evening, down the lane to the Heskith Arms. He rather hoped Peter Runciman would look in before closing time; he’d like to buy the old boy a drink. The Brigadier began to whistle a little tune.

And far away, in the unhearing silence of space, the great red ship exploded into a million fragments.

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