Island of Death Read Free Page A

thing could be really big! And it all started in India, so -’
    ‘Why are you so fired-up about it, anyway? They’re doing us a favour, aren’t they, getting Jeremy off our back?’
     
    There Sarah had to agree. But still... This needed to be approached from a different direction. She took a deep breath and launched into Clorinda-speak. ‘Tell you what, we could plan a whole campaign! “Is the New Age old hat?!” “All you need is love? We say no!” “Will meditation give you a fat bum?” That sort of thing. And I could go out to Bombay and -’
    ‘No,’ said Clorinda.
     
    Why was she so fired-up?
    The whole Skang set-up was on a par with most of the other new cults that had been springing up over the past few years. Why did she feel there was something there that was fundamentally wrong - evil, almost?
    It was then that she thought of the Doctor.
    This was right up his street, surely? A strange alien-looking creature; kids being brainwashed by a shady politician... If anybody was on the side of the good guys... And, after all, in spite of his being attached to the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, he was his own man. (Would you call a Time Lord a man?) Surely she could get in to see him after all that they’d been through together?
    But there was something she had to do first...
     
    ‘I went back, you see Doctor, and applied all over again. But I thought that Whitbread might have banned me, so I went as somebody else...’ She giggled at the memory.
    Her mother, the ultra-genteel daughter of a Harrogate vicar, used to be teased by her dad (Liverpool born and bred) calling her ‘the foreigner from across the border’; and her mum had responded with traditional Yorkshire aphorisms, like Wheere theere’s moock theeres brass ! or Niver do owt for nowt!, all in the broadest possible accent.
    So, with her hair slicked back, a pair of outrageous horn-rimmed spectacles and her mum’s even more outrageous Yorkshire accent, Sarah had called herself Daisy Peabody -
    and nearly got caught. She’d claimed that she was a champion chess-player - almost grandmaster level - on the grounds that they wouldn’t know much about it, and it would prove her ‘superlative intelligence’. But her interviewer had turned out to be a club player herself; and had only grudgingly given her the benefit of the doubt.
    And all to get a sample of the happy drink.
    ‘I pretended to swallow it, you see, and then nipped off to the loo and spat it into an aspirin bottle. And here it is!’
    Sarah looked at the white-haired figure, dapper in his velvet jacket, and felt a sensation so familiar to her when dealing with the Doctor - a sort of affectionate exasperation.
    Had he even been listening?
    Every so often as she had spun her tale, he had grunted.
    But, at the same time, he seemed to be aiming a piece of apparatus - which looked like the inside of a doorbell connected by some sort of electronic circuit to a pocket flashlight - at a fish tank that contained a sleepy-looking goldfish.
    ‘Excuse me,’ he said, and disappeared inside the TARDIS, which was standing in the corner of the cluttered lab. Sarah’s affection almost extended to the old police telephone box as well. Without it (or should it be ‘without her ’?), she’d have been stranded in medieval England, or on the planet of Parakon on the other side of the Milky Way, or... On the other hand, without the TARDIS, she wouldn’t have been in either place to begin with.
    The Doctor returned with a minute silver button (or that’s what it looked like), which he carefully fitted into the middle of his lash-up.
    ‘Stand clear,’ he said and flicked a switch.
    A swoosh, a flash, a fountain of bubbles, and the goldfish shot out of the water like a leaping dolphin.
    ‘Doctor!’ said Sarah. ‘Are you experimenting on that poor fish?’
    ‘Certainly not,’ he replied. It’s an ongoing project. Inter-species communication...’ And turning to the tank, he stuck his