13th_sherlock | Part 72

THE ADVENTURES OF A CONSULTING TIME LORD
by Soledad
CHAPTER 05 – THE SERPENT’S LAIR

Author’s note: This story takes place several weeks after “The Blind Banker” but before “The Great Game”.

PART 72 – HIDE & SEEK

Anthea had been successfully mimicking Mary in the Spice Bazaar in the recent days. Of course, the fact that she’d filed away the body language and the speech patterns of the mistress of spices proved helpful. She also got extensive data about the customers from Mummy through a live feed that could only have been discovered with the help of Gallifreyan technology – which, fortunately, Dr Roylott didn’t have to his disposal.

Still, her situation was a dangerous one, even for an android from the far future. She might be resilient – much more than the average organic being – but she wasn’t indestructible. Especially the semi-organic components of her body were equally vulnerable to substances that could destroy human flesh. And while poisons couldn’t kill her – as, in strictly human terms, she wasn’t alive – they could cause serious necrosis to her soft tissue. Damage that wouldn’t be possible to fix with 21st-century technology.

Granted, the Watcher did have a great deal of alien technology at his hands, but creating the right tissue might have been too great a challenge, even for him.

Therefore Anthea knew that she had to be careful. Dr Roylott was clearly a ruthless man; she was in danger, even if he believed that she was Mary. She might not get away undamaged – or at all – should he realise that she wasn’t.

Still, she had a job to do here, and she’d already done part of it. Her sensors – so much more sensitive and accurate than mere human senses – had already identified large amounts of various mind-altering drugs (mostly assorted kinds of opiates) under the heaps of spices. The penetrating smell of hundreds of spices overlaid the drugs so well that not even a sniffer dog would ever found them.

Which answered the main question: why would Dr Roylott need the Spice Bazaar to begin with.

The tap water was laced with drugs, too; she analysed a mouthful of it and found a substance that wasn’t even listed in the police databases but had similar effects to LSD. She sent the description of the chemical components to Mummy, asking for a planetwide search for any plants that might have produced it. It was an organic substance, not something mixed in a lab, which made the search even more complicated.

She found a different substance in the meagre Vegan food she was served by one of Dr Roylott’s followers, a skeletal boy of twenty-something, wearing the usual rough white robes of the acolytes and a sorry excuse of a beard. All male acolytes that she could see move across the courtyard wore beards; perhaps it was a symbol of rank or position within the sect.

Again, she made a quick analysis and sent the results to Mummy, asking for tests how the two substances would work together. Then she ate the food anyway; it wouldn’t be good to raise any suspicions.

In the late afternoon Dr Roylott paid her an unexpected visit. It was one outside the usual pattern, and that alarmed her. The man was no fool. Underestimating him would have been a mistake. So she demurely brought the books when he asked for them to check the daily income – which had been nothing out of the ordinary. Her allies had not shown up, for obvious reasons.

She also made sure that her pupils were dilated enough for him to believe that the drugs had indeed worked effectively. Having an android body and thus full control of its functions was a useful thing.

“Well, it seems to have been a fairly average day,” Dr Roylott finally said, closing the books. “Perhaps you should close up a bit earlier today. You look tired, my child.”

“I do feel a bit under the weather,” she admitted, knowing that the drugs were supposed to make her feel like that.

“Then you should rest,” Dr Roylott said with a benevolent smile. “Come over to the ashram. Jemimah’s room is still empty; perhaps getting away from the strong smells will help.”

“But… but I’m not allowed to leave the shop!” she protested.

“Child,” Dr Roylott answered patiently. “The shop and the ashram are in the same building. Coming over to join the rest of the community for a while wouldn’t mean that you’d be violating the rules. And it would do you a wealth of good. You’ve been too isolated here for quite some time.”

He spoke in a low, suggestive voice, and Anthea understood that Mary would follow the suggestion without resistance, despite the faulty logic behind it. So she’d have to do the same.

“If you are certain,” she murmured with downcast eyes.

Dr Roylott gave her another one of those sickeningly benevolent smiles.

“I am certain, child. You should trust your Shastri Mohashai; I only ever protect your best interests. All those strangers showing up in the shop lately have drained your strength. Their troubled spirits have taken their toll on you. Come, you need to rest.”

Without actually touching her, he shepherded her to the back door with the sheer strength of his dominant personality. Or so he believed anyway. Anthea made a convincing display of fear and reluctance to actually leave the spice shop and cross the inner courtyard that separated it from the rest of the house. Dr Roylott patiently cajoled her through what he thought would be her conditioning and steered him into the main building on the ground floor of which his so-called practice was situated.

It was fortunate that Anthea was an android, for no matter how detailed a description Mary had given of the layout of the house, a mere human would have betrayed herself by getting lost among the completely identical doors and corridors. She, of course, had the layout in her database and thus she went straight and without hesitation to the room that had once belonged to the late Julia Morstan.

Dr Roylott then wished her a restful night and left her alone.

Once on her own, the first thing Anthea did was to scan the room for any surveillance devices. To her surprise, she found none, which was highly suspicious. Dr Roylott was the ultimate control freak. If he chose to leave the room unwatched, it could only mean that he didn’t want any record of that which was about to happen in the room.

For Mary, that promised no good. For Anthea, it was practical, because she could examine the room undisturbed. She might even find something that gave her a clue about the cause of Julia Morstan’s mysterious death.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the case. The room was a little Spartan, with a low ceiling and a gaping fireplace, after the fashion of old country houses. A chest of drawers stood in one corner, a narrow counterpaned bed in another, and a dressing table on the left side of the only window. These simple pieces, with two small wickerwork chairs, made up all the furniture, save for a square, hand-made straw mat in the centre.

The walls were painted a strong white, with no decorative items anywhere. The window was shuttered; Anthea tried to force the shutters open, but without success. There was no slit through which as much as a knife could have been passed to raise the bar. Of course, she could have simply torn the whole window out of its frame with her superior strength, but that would have given her away, so she decided to continue her investigation with more… passive methods. So far she’d found nothing of interest.

The only thing that appeared somehow out of place was a thick bell-rope, which hung down on the side of the bed, the tassel actually lying upon the pillow. Mary hadn’t mentioned anything about servants that would tend to the family members, and besides, didn’t Dr Roylott go great lengths to isolate his stepdaughter from the rest of the world? Even from the rest of his sect?

Anthea didn’t share the human trait of hunches or suspicions, but everything that seemed to defy logic needed to be investigated. Thoroughly. Therefore she activated her advanced sensors again, examining minutely the cracks between the floor boards and the ones in the plain white paint that covered the wall.

She paid extra attention to the wall at which the bed stood, looking for any possible wires attached to the bell-rope. She found none; and when she gave a rope an experimental tug, her suspicions were confirmed: it was a dummy.

She found another weird detail about the room: an old-fashioned ventilator right about the bed, where the dummy bell-rope was attached. A ventilator that opened into the neighbouring room instead of into the outside and was thus every bit as useless as the bell-rope. She called up the layout of the house again and realized that the neighbouring room was Dr Roylott’s study.

The whole chamber smelled strongly of a death trap; and she knew that at least one person had already died in her, under mysterious circumstances.

It was time to call in the cavalry. Anthea made digital pictures of the room and sent them to Mummy for analysis. Then she suggested that the Watcher send her back-up. She saw an eighty-two per cent possibility that Dr Roylott would try to get rid of his stepdaughter – or of the person he thought was his stepdaughter – in this very night.

~TBC~