by Mark Speed
They arrived in Dagenham by rail, and the Doctor consulted his smartphone. “It’s just a mile or so over to the east,” he said.
“So we’ll get a cab, then?”
“Heavens, no – we’ll walk.”
“We’re going to walk to a taxi depot? Is this for real?”
“Yes, it’s all for real, Kevin. Come on.”
They arrived twenty minutes later in a semi-industrial area of tatty red brick buildings which had avoided refurbishment since their heyday in the Fifties. The compound belonging to Grove Cab Services was around fifty feet wide and a hundred long. Grey metal fencing ten feet high separated it from the road at the front and sides, and the railway embankment at the rear. The fence posts were flattened galvanised steel with a triple point at the top. A profusion of weeds grew at the bottom, and the top had been secured with razor wire. On two sides the compound was bordered by buildings – those belonging to the business were at the front, and on the other side there was the external wall of a neighbouring unit. Three cabs – their roofs scratched and windows broken – sat on the pot-holed tarmac, set at odd angles to each other as if they’d been casually put down by a giant. A white transit van that had seen better days was the only other vehicle in the yard. The crash of a piece of metal falling echoed from inside one of the buildings at the front. A passenger train rattled past on the embankment fifteen feet above as the Doctor and Kevin approached the entrance to the office.
“Let me do the talking, but follow my lead,” said the Doctor. “You’re my assistant. Your area of expertise is car mechanics.”
“But I don’t know the first thing about cars.”
“Then you should be working at your local garage.”
“What?”
“You’d fit in perfectly and earn a fortune on repeat business.”
“I don’t get you.”
“That was humour, Kevin. I do it sometimes.”
The Doctor pushed open the door and they found themselves in a small, basic reception area – the kind of reception area that never receives female visitors. A man looked up from a desk behind the counter. He was bald, white and in his fifties. “Can’t do nothing for you, guv. Bit of an accident the other day, and the owner-drivers are all over in town. I hate to say it, but there’s a private hire firm just down the road there. They usually have a couple of spare drivers.”
“Mr Grove? We’re from the insurance,” said the Doctor.
“Eh? We had someone in yesterday doing the assessment.”
“Loss adjustment,” corrected the Doctor. “Who was it? Briggs’?”
“No, Swann.”
“Well, that explains everything.” The Doctor lifted up a flap in the counter and moved into Grove’s personal space. “We don’t just underwrite them, we have to check every adjustment they make. We just need to take a quick look at the damage. Take some pictures.”
“Erm. Sure. Be my guest.” Mr Grove stood up, revealing a pronounced beer belly. Kevin dug the Doctor in the ribs.
“My understanding is that your business maintains its own fleet of cabs, and maintains cabs for owner-drivers,” said the Doctor.
“Yeah, s’right,” said Grove, leading them through to the exit at the back. He held it open for them as they stepped into the yard. Close up, they could see that the three cabs had scratches and dents on their right-hand sides. “They was all turned over on their backs when we came in. Fuel tanks severed.”
“You’ve done a good job of cleaning up the diesel – I see no trace of it on the surface of the puddles,” said the Doctor.
“There weren’t none. Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to half-inch a few gallons of fuel.”
“And the police didn’t find any prints?”
“They dusted the side of that one.” Grove drew them round to show them the side of a cab that had been covered in fine aluminium powder. “But of course you’ve got hundreds of members of the public all over them doors every day. Waste of time.”
“And I believe the intruder or intruders got in over there?” The Doctor pointed to an area of fencing bordering the railway embankment at the back. The cross-bars at the bottom had been severed and a section several feet wide had been bent upwards to the height of a man.
“Bleedin’ amazing, innit?” said Grove as they walked over to examine it. “This is quality stuff. Cost us a fortune. You’d need an oxy-acetylene torch to get through that in a reasonable time. Then you’d want some big jacks to do the bending, wouldn’t you?”
“And there’s nothing to set the jacks against except the earth embankment, so the initial bending would be a problem.”
“Exactly.” Grove pointed towards the end of the fence. “And you’d have to haul all that kit through these brambles.” He laughed. “And for what? Vandalise some black cabs? Use the jacks to turn ’em over on their backs and then cut the fuel tanks off to nick the diesel? If that makes sense to you, then you should be certified. Never ’eard of anything like it.”
“Any CCTV footage?”
“Camera only covers the exit. You expect someone to try and half-inch vehicles, and – like I say – you don’t expect someone to go to this bother to do this.”
The Doctor pulled a camera out of his jacket pocket and took a couple of pictures from different angles. “I imagine you must feel rather hard done-by.”
Grove laughed again. “Hard done-by don’t even come into it, squire. Here, you’ll want to see the underside of one of them cabs.”
They turned and walked back to the building. Adjacent to where they’d exited the office was a metal roller-shutter, which Grove banged on. “George!” A few seconds later there was the whine of an electric motor and the shutter clattered upwards into its cover to reveal another overweight middle-aged man next to the control pad. Once it reached the height of the Doctor’s head, the shutter stopped with a rattle and they walked into the workshop. There were two hydraulic platforms side by side, but only one black cab was being serviced. It was four feet off the ground. The crashing sound they’d heard earlier was evidently a damaged side panel being removed.
“Insurance,” said Grove, jerking a thumb at the Doctor and Kevin. “Give her a couple more feet.” He grabbed an electric light in a protective cage on the end of a cable and switched it on.
George clicked a button on the wall and the cab rose high enough for the others to get in underneath. The Doctor had to duck his head slightly.
“There you are. Clean cut. I don’t know what does that. Biggest pair of pliers on God’s green Earth, I should have thought.” He tapped Kevin on the chest and then pointed along the fuel line. “You can see for yourself I’m going to have to replace the entire line. Yeah?”
“Goes without saying,” said Kevin, trying to sound like he understood.
The Doctor took a couple more photographs and pocketed his camera. From the same pocket he brought out a glass phial with a bud sticking down into the container from the stopper at the top. “Has anyone touched this?”
“George? Did you touch the tank yet?”
“Nah. No spares for any of that. Had a side-panel in stock. Get through plenty of those. The other stuff is on order. Maybe later today.”
The Doctor pulled the stopper off the top of the phial and rubbed the bud against the surfaces of the cut.
“What’s that for?” asked Grove.
“Looking for traces of whatever made the cut.”
“You’re ’aving a giraffe, ain’t you?”
“Nothing humorous about modern forensic loss-adjustment,” said the Doctor. “I’d certainly be interested in what kind of tool was used.”
“I’d be much happier if you could just get the readies to me. This is murder on my cash flow – not to mention damage to my reputation. Hang on… are you implying that we might have used some of our own gear to do this?”
“Not at all. What would be your motive?”
“Well, exactly. Thank you.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d li
ke to examine that hole in the fence again.”
“I thought you was wanting to see more of the damage to the cabs?”
“Eh? Oh, well we’d want to make sure the fence was secure to prevent a repeat. Otherwise you’d expect a jump in premiums, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure. Whatever. You do what you have to do. Some of us have to work for a living.” Grove went back to his office and the Doctor ushered Kevin over to the hole in the fence.
“Whatever did this was unbelievably strong,” said the Doctor. He dabbed a second phial against the severed edges of the metal. “And where did it come from and go to?”
“The bushes the other side have been crushed a bit,” said Kevin. “Something’s been in them.”
“Yes, I see that. Then further up the embankment it’s all been cut back by the railway company so you can’t see any traces of where whatever it was might have come from. Typical.” He stepped underneath the gap and looked along the back of the fence, to where it ran into the back wall of the neighbouring business. “Bingo.”
“What?”
“You should see this. The brambles have been crushed and ripped right along the back of these properties. There’s a mound of fresh earth against the back wall over there. Come on, lad.”
Kevin followed him along the bottom of the embankment, stumbling a couple of times when his feet snagged on bramble stems. The Doctor seemed to have little difficulty, and the youth was out of breath when they reached the edge of the pile. He flapped the bottom of his hoodie to let fresh air in.
“Smell that, Kevin?”
“Diesel, innit?”
“Exactly. See how earth has spread out against the wall? Whatever it was has burrowed into the side of the embankment, so the soil’s scattered down and to the side slightly. Absolutely no sign that the police even bothered coming to look at this. Hopeless.”
He climbed up the embankment to just above the disturbed soil and stamped on it. “Sounds hollow. This mound of earth wasn’t dumped here; it’s a burrow.” He stamped hard again nearer to the edge of the earth and a clod came away underfoot, causing him to lose his balance and teeter. Once he’d recovered he kicked the clod away to reveal the top of a hole leading into the side of the embankment. He made a face and then stepped onto the earth so that he could bend down and take a look inside. He sank up to his ankles.
“Aren’t you, like, scared, Doctor?”
“This was done a couple of days ago. The amount of soil displaced would indicate that this is either a small hole dug as a temporary hiding place, or that the thing that dug it is moving through the ground.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This amount of soil,” the Doctor indicated the mound he was standing on, “we can probably assume is about the size of the thing that dug it out. If it had dug a temporary hole to hide in, then it probably would have done a better job of covering up the entrance. All I can see through here is the top of more soil. So the thing is just displacing an amount of soil equal to the volume of its body as it tunnels. That’s my view, anyway.” He gave a rare smile. “My professional opinion, as someone who has investigated plenty of seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Whatever did this has long gone.”
“Like where?”
“I have no idea. Underground. The sewers, perhaps? Unlikely, since they are underneath the service roads for this estate, rather than to the rear. And it might be too big to fit in anything but a main sewer. You saw the size of the tailings from the first incident.”
“Tailings?”
“You know: spoil. The right word for the stuff left over from mining activity. I think we can call this either tailings or spoil, since we’ve established that this is a burrow. Precision is key in these things, Kevin.”
“Whatever.”
“Oh, please don’t be flippant. What else do you think we can deduce from this?”
“Are you, like, seriously asking me?”
“Of course. I want to teach you to think a little for yourself.”
Kevin sucked his teeth. “We know it’s incredibly strong.” The Doctor nodded. “It seems to like diesel. It burrows.”
“And?”
“It can cut through metal.”
“Good. And what else?”
“Uh… it hates black cabs?”
“Exactly. It seems to have a little penchant for wrecking black cabs. Very good. Or it could be a ‘they’, rather than an ‘it’. And every incident took place at night.”
“Yeah. So, uh, where does that leave us?”
“Absolutely nowhere. I need to see the results of the samples I’ve taken. Come.” The Doctor pulled his feet out of the pile of mud and shook the dirt from them. Every trace fell off, leaving behind perfectly clean black trousers and polished shoes. He started walking back through the mutilated undergrowth towards the hole in the fence.
“That’s like…amazing. Can I get some clothes made of that?”
“Restricted technology,” said the Doctor over his shoulder. “Sorry.” His tone brightened a little, and he added, “Though your people are getting fairly close.” He chuckled to himself. “It’s funny. It was way before your time, and it’s not played much on the TV these days – not that I think you watch old black-and-white films anyway – but there was a film called The Man in the White Suit. Came out in the early Fifties. Alec Guinness played the lead. You’d know him better as –”
“Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars!”
“Oh, well remembered.”
“Gimme a break, Doc. Like, how could I not know that? How could I not know my man Obi-Wan?”
“If you believe the press, most inner-city children don’t know that milk comes from a cow, or potatoes from the ground.”
“Well, that’s like, not important information, is it?”
The Doctor stopped and twisted round to look at Kevin. “You what?”
“Like, am I going to milk a cow in Tulse Hill, Doc? Or am I going to dig up some plant roots if I want fries? Nah, I’m just going to rock over to BK and get me some fries and a milkshake, innit? Milk comes from a bottle, or a machine if you want a shake. It’s irrelevant. You get me? That information is, like, surplus to my requirements. I don’t need to know that in order to survive in today’s sophisticated urban environment, does I?”
“Well, I suppose you’re right on one thing: those milkshakes have probably never seen a cow either. I dread to think what I’d find if I did tests on one of those.”
“So get on with your story.”
The Doctor ducked under the bent fence and back into the yard. “Oh, just a recollection. It was only a few years after the end of the war. Things were still fresh in the folk memory. Science had taken leaps and bounds, and a few people had seen the seemingly impossible in the previous decade – aeroplanes without propellers, for example; the jet-powered fighter. So they wrote this satire about a man who had invented a miracle material which was incredibly hard-wearing and impervious to any kind of contamination. Since it couldn’t be dyed, it was white. Hence The Man in the White Suit.”
“So what happened?”
“The factory owners and the unions realised he was a threat to the entire business, so they tried to stop him, of course. He’d have ruined them all – destroyed the industry. In the end, the material turned out to be unstable, so the suit fell apart and all was well.”
“So you’re afraid if you give us this cloth we’ll not have a textile manufacturing industry?”
“No, not at all. You’re such a vain species you’ll never tire of wasteful fashions. You’d probably end up with endless landfills full of perfectly good clothes you simply didn’t like.”
“Thanks for yet another insult.”
“Not intended. Sorry.”
“Well, what’s your point?”
“No point, dear boy. No point. Just an amusing anecdote about our portrayal in popular culture.”
“You mean…?”
“It’s difficult to keep everything a comp
lete secret. Things leak at the sides. One of the film’s writers, Alexander Mackendrick, worked for the Ministry of Information during the war.”
“So what about Doctor Who the TV series?”
“That was a step too far. I will talk no more on this matter for now. You will find out more in our further adventures.” The Doctor opened the office door in the back of the building and Kevin followed him inside.
Grove swivelled in his seat. “See all you wanted to see?”
“Yes, thank you,” said the Doctor. “Just one thing. Was the Transit van left here overnight?”
“Yeah. The van was here. So was one of the other cabs.”
“Really?” said the Doctor.
“Well, yeah. I did mention it in the original report.”
“I must have missed that. My apologies. And this other cab wasn’t damaged at all?”
“Not apart from the paint and the flat battery. A couple of scratches on the roof.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, these vandals had splashed this stuff over the back of it. Took the paint off. The police said it was like that gel they use to remove graffiti. It’s at the paint shop now. Corroded the rubber around the rear window too. That’ll have to be replaced. It’s at the paint shop now getting a respray.”
“Was there anything different about this cab?”
“Jesus, you said Swann was bad. I don’t think much of your outfit either. Did you actually read the report?”
“I can only apologise. They tend to send me into these things a bit blind – start from first principles and all that.”
“It was an older model. FX4. Rounder lines. You know the one. Superseded by the TX1 back in, let me see, ninety-seven I think it was. Problem with the FX4 was that you can leave the lights on after taking the key out. Can’t do that in the later models.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the driver had left the internal lights on. Oh, and the Taxi sign.”
“The orange sign on the front that lights up when it’s for hire?”
