Doctor Who_ The Cabinet Of Light Part 1

THE CABINET OF LIGHT.

by Daniel O'Mahony.

FOREWORD by CHAZ BRENCHLEY

AT THE HEART OF ALL GOOD MYSTERY WRITING, PERHAPS AT THE HEART OF ALL GOOD writing, beats a single driving theme, and that's ident.i.ty. At the heart of all good mystery writing, perhaps at the heart of all good writing, beats a single driving theme, and that's subversion. writing, beats a single driving theme, and that's ident.i.ty. At the heart of all good mystery writing, perhaps at the heart of all good writing, beats a single driving theme, and that's subversion.

And already we have a paradox: two hearts that cannot possibly beat as one; and that's fine, because this is fiction we're talking about, and in fiction actually they can. Famously, the Doctor has two hearts in any case but even if he didn't, or even where it's only concerned with us simpler monocores, any story worth its salt dances to this double rhythm. You don't have to go to Bach in search of counterpoint; fiction too can be polyphonic, drawing its edge and its energy from the relentless opposition of equal voices.

At its simplest and least sophisticated, crime fiction has its mystery embodied in its own generic name: whodunit? This is the Agatha Christie end of the market, not so much a novel as a puzzle-book, a jigsaw in story form but still dealing with that fundamental question of ident.i.ty as it sets out to unmask a murderer. The reader either leaps ahead of the detective or is left running to catch up, demanding an explanation at the end with all the clues laid out for examination; either way it doesn't matter, the chase is the point of it, the hunt is all that counts. It's a ritual, an embodiment of tradition, a rea.s.surance: all will be well, and the world can be put back together just as it was, save for these missing pieces.

More subtly, more darkly, the private eye novel is really more concerned with the ident.i.ty of its hero. We read Chandler to find out about Philip Marlowe which is where the subversion starts, but by no means where it ends. We're offered the standard coin of crime, drugs and vice and corruption, but we find ourselves more interested in the narrator than in the story he tells; and all the time the way he tells that story, the language and the rhythms of his voice, act as another counterpoint to the plot. The words flow like a river, like a fugue (never forgetting that fugue has another meaning too, as a psychological state, an amnesiac's flight from reality: just ask the girl in pink pyjamas about that, as she opens this story) and, like a fugue, like a river, the glittering surface hides undercurrents that undercut the solid bank we think we stand on. Nothing is or ever can be that solid, in Marlowe's world; trust all your weight to something or to someone and you will fall through.

In an essay published in 1950, Chandler said of that world, 'Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.' Daniel O'Mahony borrows that same line here, in The Cabinet of Light; it's an The Cabinet of Light; it's an affirmation that to be frank is not really necessary, but it is peculiarly apt. The story's geography may be transposed from the neon spangle of Los Angeles to the physical and psychological ruin of post-war London, the milieu may be transposed from gangsterdom to that borderland where science meets magic, from Mr Big to D affirmation that to be frank is not really necessary, but it is peculiarly apt. The story's geography may be transposed from the neon spangle of Los Angeles to the physical and psychological ruin of post-war London, the milieu may be transposed from gangsterdom to that borderland where science meets magic, from Mr Big to Doctor Who, but we're still treading the same fictional territory here, we're still talking about mystery and subversion. And we're still discussing them in the same rich language, still laying traps for the unwary and playing word-games for the aficionado. but we're still treading the same fictional territory here, we're still talking about mystery and subversion. And we're still discussing them in the same rich language, still laying traps for the unwary and playing word-games for the aficionado.

Goya said that the sleep of reason brings forth monsters. Lecha.s.seur's dreams do the same, we're told so very early; and that's appropriate, that's the message here, that Lecha.s.seur (the hunter, of course) is the voice of reason, he's a rational man. But he's loose in a world that lacks rationality; even the Doctor makes better sense in this monstrous post- apocalyptic landscape than our human hero. Lecha.s.seur isn't even comfortably at home in his own body or his life, afflicted by visions and premonitions, curiously healed from a disabling injury, seeking constantly to remake himself from soldier to spiv to investigator. The traditional hunter, the private eye figure, is always and necessarily an outsider, an observer, a stranger in a strange land; here that's taken to extremes, making Lecha.s.seur the true alien in this story, for all the Doctor's two hearts and inherent transience.

Two hearts make for double jeopardy, and it's always seemed to me that we ask a great deal of our writers, a double achievement: clarity of thought and clarity of language, a strong instinct for the story and another for the music, the voice of a poet and a mind like a steel trap. O'Mahony doesn't disappoint, on either side. I'd have stayed with him for the story, simply to find out what happened; I'd have followed him for the telling of it, simply to hear more and never mind its meaning. But that's too clumsy a distinction, for the delicate transactions of English prose; you can't truly shave one from the other. How can we know the dancer from the dance? We only know when one of them is stumbling, and neither one does here, bound up as tight as they are in each other and in the structure of the piece, which is the third part of the divided whole. A novella is a hard thing to shape, too baggy for a short story and far too constraining for a novel; all too easy to let any sense of structure slip. And to cheat, perhaps, to fall back on lazy practice, perhaps to haul in a deus ex machina deus ex machina at the end why not, when you've been gifted with the perfect excuse, a very literal G.o.d-in-a-box, the Doctor with his TARDIS at his back? Not here. That perhaps is the final subversion, that the ending is its own business, irresolute and compelling, depending neither on the Doctor nor on the hero-figure Lecha.s.seur forcing a solution to the mystery. It would be unfair to say more, as there are some traditions we must still observe, but it's tight, it's true and it is entirely unexpected. at the end why not, when you've been gifted with the perfect excuse, a very literal G.o.d-in-a-box, the Doctor with his TARDIS at his back? Not here. That perhaps is the final subversion, that the ending is its own business, irresolute and compelling, depending neither on the Doctor nor on the hero-figure Lecha.s.seur forcing a solution to the mystery. It would be unfair to say more, as there are some traditions we must still observe, but it's tight, it's true and it is entirely unexpected.

George Pelecanos writes some of the most interesting crime thrillers coming out of America at the moment; he has said that all his work is about what it means to be a man (with the subtext 'in contemporary urban US society' understood). Perhaps it's not too flippant to suggest that all Doctor Who fiction is about what it means to be a Time Lord. The understood subtext is that it is written by humans, and actually we haven't yet figured out quite what it means to be us. The t.i.tle itself poses a question of ident.i.ty, and in so far as it has an answer at all, it has always shifted with the seasons. In the end, what it comes back to is the mystery. Welcome to The Cabinet of Light The Cabinet of Light. Anyone got the key?

Chaz Brenchley, October 2002

PROLOGUE: NIGHT AND FOG.

IT WAS A TYPICAL EAST END FOG; IT WASN'T WHITE.

Like all true Londoners, and despite what he saw at the flicks, Cranfield knew the fog was green green. It was a damp, tubercular, rea.s.suring shade. For years the night sky had glowed livid pink, shot through with dust and flame, though that was fading now. With time the tiny clumps of black or red flowers that bloomed on the rubble would die out. Cranfield was a young man, he hoped to be pounding this beat twenty, thirty years on. His father had walked these streets when the first tentative bombs fell; his great-uncle had hunted the Ripper and the Limehouse Phantom nearby; he was walking in their footsteps and in the labyrinth of fogs he could almost believe their paths would cross, three generations of policemen at the same crossroads.

There came the peal of a bell from Sh.o.r.editch, hairs p.r.i.c.kled on the back of his neck, a memory of sirens and all-clear whistles and the chime calling all hands to help pull bodies from the river.

His beat took him past Spitalfields Market, which was shut up for the night though the gate still thronged with people. The church opposite attracted them like doodlebugs. It was bone-white, yellowed with neglect then scorched black by a Luftwaffe handprint that might not fade for generations. To one side there was a scrub of gra.s.s where vagrants slept under newsprint blankets, though Cranfield couldn't imagine the dreams the church would give them. By day, when the streets filled with human heat, old women would sit on the steps beneath the angular spire and suck green oranges and spit the pips onto the street to mock austerity. Cranfield felt great sympathy for them, the living public. By night the stones absorbed all the heat and people stayed huddled round pub doorways till closing time, then at the market gate. Ragged around the gate were the dark facades of houses, pitted with gaps where other homes had stood until, one night, they had been transformed into cairns of brick rubble and human pulp.

Outside the market a woman was singing, a broken voice, eerily Cranfield couldn't see where it was coming from. They were mainly women here, in their cl.u.s.ters. Vagrants stood shivering by a fire on the scrub. A dirt-faced boy ran in the street, grinning, clipped past Cranfield and the policeman instinctively felt like lashing out, but checked himself. There was a woman squatting on the steps, older than she looked, wrapped in a dark shawl but bare-headed; she sold flowers by day and had a flower's name but he couldn't place it right now. There was an old soldier beside her, tall and heavy in his black cap and coat; he turned to look at Cranfield with a long dead slab-face that probably hadn't twitched since 1918. Cranfield tipped the rim of his hat and nodded automatically, but the eye that watched him was white and sightless.

He moved through them, watching them bristle as he pa.s.sed. Overhead was a shiny bomber's moon; they could all feel it, despite the fog. There was a patch of darkness on the far side of the church. The girl came stumbling out of that, a splash of violent pink in the midst of green. Cranfield wasn't the first to see her, it was the commotion that made him turn, but he was the closest and when she lost her footing he was there to catch her.

A few days later he would barely remember what she looked like. There was just the memory of her as she shambled towards him, taking each step as though it were her first, wearing nothing but a baggy pink pair of pyjamas. Not silk, not cotton, not even nylon, just pink and shiny in the moonlight. She was barefoot, her feet were blue. The pink pyjamas hung crumpled on her wiry frame. She was small enough for Cranfield to mistake her for a child, though once he got close he realised she was probably in her twenties. She was a skinny pale thing, she shivered in the autumn fog, but she looked hurt rather than cold. Her eyes told him that they had a grey traumatised sheen, witness-eyes. He could tell, just by looking, that her grasp on the everyday had been ripped away, and savagely. could tell, just by looking, that her grasp on the everyday had been ripped away, and savagely.

It had been over four years since Cranfield held anyone like this. Then it had been a girl no older than twelve, and he cradled her in his arms as the life left her body. You heard stories of Blitz miracles all the time, unlikely survivors, but he had never seen one with his own eyes. This woman wasn't going to die. Her stare leapt wildly round the faces of the gathered crowd. He could feel delicate bones through her pyjamas.

'What's happened to you?' he asked. She was smiling. He tried a more basic approach: 'What's your name?'

'I don't remember,' she said. 'What year is this? I don't remember the year.' Someone mumbled it, embarra.s.sed. The girl nodded and grinned. It was hard to tell if she understood the date. Cranfield thought sh.e.l.lshock, though that made no sense. She had a Blitz-twitch. There were no signs of violence on her face, on her clothes.

'I don't know who I am.' Her eyes opened wider and she grabbed his uniform frantically. 'Police...' she said, and again he knew she was a victim.

'Are you hurt?''I remember light,' she insisted. 'I was going to die! There was so much light.'

She held open palms out for Cranfield to inspect, as if she'd been clutching the light in them, but her hands were just dark, bruised pink. A chill rippled through him anyway. Someone else was kneeling beside him, the flower-seller, holding out a worn out bloom, so blackened it was impossible to tell what it had ever been. The girl took it mutely, keeping her mouth tight shut as if holding back a scream.

Then her eyes closed and her head lolled back but she was only asleep.

The girl in pink pyjamas. The police never found a name for her and the press didn't need one. She became a celebrity and her fame spread wide, though not far beyond London. Briefly, she captured the public imagination all the melodramatic ingredients were there, the pretty girl, the sinister East End setting, a crime so terrible she had wiped it from her mind, even the pink pyjamas added a frisson that helped sell papers.The girl in pink pyjamas. She was a distraction for dangerous times. She took up the front pages and kept the frightening business of the day folded within. You could look at her photograph and forget rationing and devaluation, Pakistan and Palestine, airlifts and fuel crises, China and Germany, the FBI and the MGB, and the silent dustclouds rising over Kazakhstan. She always looked damaged in the photographs, the authentic face of 1949. So, she was pinned through the middle of the twentieth century. All of London knew who she was, even if she didn't. She was a distraction for dangerous times. She took up the front pages and kept the frightening business of the day folded within. You could look at her photograph and forget rationing and devaluation, Pakistan and Palestine, airlifts and fuel crises, China and Germany, the FBI and the MGB, and the silent dustclouds rising over Kazakhstan. She always looked damaged in the photographs, the authentic face of 1949. So, she was pinned through the middle of the twentieth century. All of London knew who she was, even if she didn't.

The girl in pink pyjamas. Eventually her celebrity waned and she was gradually forgotten. After a few days, once the novelty had worn off and the police had turned up no new leads, she began to vanish from the newspapers. By then, she had come to the attention of the Doctor. But perhaps he already knew.

1: THE CITY OF EXILES.

EACH MORNING AFTER MIDNIGHT, A WOMAN STOOD IN THE STREET BENEATH HONORe Lecha.s.seur's window and screamed abuse at the b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d Irish who had taken her son away. That was several wars ago but, sitting alone in the dark, Lecha.s.seur could see the bullet going through her dead son's skull. Lecha.s.seur's window and screamed abuse at the b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.s.t.a.r.d Irish who had taken her son away. That was several wars ago but, sitting alone in the dark, Lecha.s.seur could see the bullet going through her dead son's skull.

Lecha.s.seur rarely slept but spent his nights drinking, whiskey, sometimes vodka. He'd lost the capacity to get drunk in 1944 and took alcohol as an anaesthetic. His dreams brought forth monsters, they always had done, but London seemed to amplify them. Cheap whiskey was easy to find for someone with the right contacts, though Lecha.s.seur was beginning to suspect that his were wrong. Recently he'd taken a consignment of meat from a reliable source. It had been a bad deal. The meat was rancid, almost green, crawling with maggots.

He had wrapped a slab of the rotten meat in newspaper. The paper carried a report and a picture of a pretty, dazed-looking woman posing uneasily in light grey pyjamas. The image caught his eye, as sometimes important things would, but he decided it was just a sympathetic reaction. She looked out of place, another exile in London. The grainy picture rubbed off on his hands.

Rationing would last a little longer. After that the future was up for grabs.

He dreamed of the future sometimes, of a hybrid London whose familiar skyline had been fused with towers of gla.s.s and steel. He sat cross-legged on his bed dreaming with his eyes open. He'd had vivid dreams as a boy once he twitched and fitted on a street corner while in his mind he was out on the bayou, fighting a muck-encrusted gold-eyed swamp monster. That was rare, nothing to worry the conscription board. Then he was blasted through a Belgian farmhouse window and the dreams became sharper. Sometimes they came true and sometimes they didn't.

That morning he had managed to sleep a little and have ordinary dreams and the first thing he said to himself when he woke was 'doctor' but he didn't take it to mean anything. but he didn't take it to mean anything.

Around him his apartment was spartan and undecorated. He liked the clean bareness of the room, the raw plaster walls, the exposed plumbing, the pale brown wood of the floorboards. Sometimes he was forced to stow contraband here, most recently silk underwear and Russian cigarettes. He'd piled them in a corner but still bristled at the clutter they represented. The most important things he carried in his head. He let few people in. This was his private s.p.a.ce.

He washed and dressed and inspected himself in the bathroom mirror. He'd let his hair grow since the army neatly and down to his shoulders, and was cultivating a thin black beard and moustache. The black was shot through with premature lines of grey. He was already a distinctive figure in this neighbourhood, a colourful exotic with a slow charismatic smile and coffee dark skin. There were disadvantages but sometimes it helped to be hidden in plain sight.

His reflection stared back at him, hypnotically. He had prominent eyes, icy-white with deep brown pupils. He practised a rogue's grin, he practised a big confident stare. He brushed his teeth mouthing phrases in a bad English accent. Splendid. I beg your pardon. Good show. Splendid. I beg your pardon. Good show. His mouth was a slash on his face, frothing with smuggled American toothpaste. He never slept but he always felt good in the mornings. Something in the unrationed day-light of London made him feel free. His mouth was a slash on his face, frothing with smuggled American toothpaste. He never slept but he always felt good in the mornings. Something in the unrationed day-light of London made him feel free.

The one thing Lecha.s.seur knew he would never adjust to was the winter. It was always so cold here even in summer the temperature couldn't touch the coldest New Orleans day. He pulled on his black leather winter coat before leaving. He'd also taken to wearing a hat, not so much because of the cold but because it kept the dreams trapped in his head.

You look like a gangster, he told the reflection. He'd been moved to England in 1943, posted to a foreign land where everyone from the lowliest private to the highest-ranking Blimp believed that all America was Chicago and Al Capone was her honorary president. he told the reflection. He'd been moved to England in 1943, posted to a foreign land where everyone from the lowliest private to the highest-ranking Blimp believed that all America was Chicago and Al Capone was her honorary president.

After the war, he'd decided that was true.

In 1944 he'd been told he would never walk again. He bounded out of the room and ran down the stairs. His landlady was standing halfway down, old Mrs Bag-of-Bones, with her knitted shawl and her patient smile that she wore only for the strange polite black foreign gentleman in her attic. He caught the banisters, set them creaking, before he could bowl into her.

'Good morning, Mr L. You're full of beans today.'Like so many Londoners, his landlady couldn't quite get her tongue round his name, so he became Mr L. It all added to the l.u.s.tre.

'I always am,' he said, as he edged past. 'And I've got an appointment.'

She called after him: 'There were men asking after you again last night. I told them you weren't here.'

'Were they police?' he asked, not turning.

'I shouldn't think so. They were very rough men. Ugly with big hands.'

'Ah, you had me worried there. They sound like old friends,' he said, mainly to a.s.suage her fears. He knew a great many ugly men with big hands but he liked to keep them away from his home. Sometimes he felt a wanderl.u.s.t and imagined a life half on the run, sleeping where and when he could, but the simple pleasure of having a fixed place of his own always outweighed that.

Besides, he liked Mrs Bag-of-Bones. On quiet evenings they'd talk together in her kitchen, exchanging war stories while she taught him how to enjoy tea. She'd lost a son in the Spanish Civil War. Like so many she was followed wherever she went by the faceless dead. London was haunted, she masked her eyes with pebble-thick gla.s.ses to avoid seeing them.

If he was troubled by the thought of night visitors, Lecha.s.seur felt happier once he'd got out into the bitter air and onto his bike. He travelled everywhere he could by bicycle. He felt more connected with his surroundings than he would in an automobile and it was exhilarating to feel the rhythm of his legs as he pedalled. After the blast had shredded his spine he'd had to re-learn the art of walking. It had come to him surprisingly quickly and he always felt that he'd somehow embarra.s.sed the US Army by trumping their predictions.

It was a ten minute ride to the cafe but he was held up at a checkpoint. It had been raised overnight in a once-narrow road that had been widened by the Luftwaffe eight years earlier, whole rows of solid planted houses gouged out of the ground. He'd ventured down into a bombsite once, like an archaeologist or a grave-robber. The dust from the blast still seemed to hang in the air, dull and unmagical.

Uniformed coppers manned the checkpoint and you could never tell with them. They were too often intimidated by his height, his colour and most of all his accent. He asked politely what was going on. Last night a boy had found a UXB while playing and cradled it in the dark, crying softly until dawn when a rescue party found him. The army were defusing it and Lecha.s.seur was redirected with a warning. London was tense. There'd been reports of explosions around the East End a few nights earlier but there was no trace by the morning. It was as if the city were refighting the war in its memories, phantom bombs and dream murders. Lecha.s.seur had always felt sensitive to these things.

He locked up his bike outside the cafe, a place he knew well, though it was the other party who suggested they meet there. He'd heard of her through a mutual contact. He knew nothing about her. He knew her at once, sitting alone in the corner, watching the door with fidgety nervous eyes. He felt warier than before but walked over to hover at the table.

She looked up.

'Monsieur Layshazoor?' Layshazoor?' she asked. she asked.

He pulled the spare chair back in an easy motion and sat down to face her.

'Just Mister,' he said, smiling leisurely to show her white teeth. 'I'm not French. It's just a name. I don't have a drop of French blood in my

veins.'

'Did I p.r.o.nounce it right?''Close,' he told her, still smiling. A greasy boy came to the table and Lecha.s.seur ordered coffee and breakfast. The woman had started without him, half-eaten bacon, eggs, fried bread swam in grease on her plate, the cutlery askew across it. Next to that was an ashtray with three cigarette stubs pressed into it. She had a fourth between her lips. Her hands, long and delicate with painted red nails, rubbed against each other on the wood tabletop. Lecha.s.seur put his hands opposite hers and kept them still. He looked at her.

'You must be Mrs Blandish,' he said.She slow-blinked. 'Yes. Emily Blandish.' She rolled the name round her tongue. She had an elegant mouth and she knew just how much lipstick to apply to bring out the red. She was, Lecha.s.seur decided once he'd sat down, very raw and attractive. She had big baby blue eyes and healthy white skin. There was a heavy line in the bones of her face, of her shoulders, but she knew how to work with that. She wore a shortsleeved dress that exposed prettily freckled shoulders and the soft flesh of her neck. She had bleach-blonde hair, wavy but faded like a photograph. It didn't matter, it was a tight frame for a pretty face. She was seated but he could tell she was quite tall. He wanted her to stand so he could see her height, the shape of her back, the seam down her stockings.

He pursed his lips and blew silently. That made her nervous.It was strange, he decided, that she could make herself look so confident yet also so shy. She looked slumped and uneasy. She sensed that, stubbing out her cigarette and shifting in her seat, ready to set out her proposal.

'Do you smoke?' Emily Blandish asked.

'No, thanks.'

'So,' she said, after a pause. 'You're American.'

'You noticed,' he replied. He realised he was trying to flirt.

'I was in America before the war. I was an actress then... well, a dancer, to be honest. Danced Broadway, vaudeville, hoofed round the States trying to get to Hollywood. I never did.' She'd relaxed, she smiled. Lecha.s.seur studied her face carefully and decided that this was probably true. There was a bra.s.sy, trouper's edge in her voice, try as she might to sound like Celia Johnson. Maybe that's why this felt wrong like too many Brits she was hung up with cla.s.s and respectability. She was trying to impress him.

'So where are you from? I can't place your accent.'

'Louisiana. New Orleans.'

She shook her head. 'That doesn't sound right. I was in New Orleans for a month, I know the accent. Yours is different. I hope you don't mind me saying.'

'I've been over here since 1943. Ten years from now I'll sound like the Home Service. And no, I don't mind you saying.'

She smiled again with a real curl on her lips. She ordered more coffee from the greasy boy and hugged it when it came. The coffee was good here, it was probably from cheap beans Lecha.s.seur had supplied himself and he'd never bilked anyone. Mrs Blandish stared at him over the rim of the mug. She was mellow-eyed. Mrs Blandish he looked at her bare fingers, no wedding band. he looked at her bare fingers, no wedding band.

'I've never met a proper spiv before.' She was lying and wanted him to know it. He tried to look offended.

'I prefer to be called a fixer,' he explained. 'Imagine there's a line and on one side there is everything legal and on the other everything is illegal. I like to walk along the line. Either side, it doesn't matter, so long as I stick close by it. Don't go wandering off,' he added faintly.

It occurred to him that she might be working for the police, but if she was he'd know and he'd never been guarded in his conversation.

She lit another cigarette and sat with it crooked in her fingers, watching him play with his food. He ate slowly, the breakfast was heavy and hard to swallow. He wondered what was going on in her head. Then she said: 'I don't want the police involved in my business.'

'So, this is something on the wrong side of the line?' Their mutual contact, a man called Mace, hadn't told him what Mrs Blandish wanted. It was likely she'd kept him in the dark as well. That was what intrigued Lecha.s.seur, her wilful mystery. Even as he spoke, Emily's face stiffened, her lips tightening, the flirty eyes flicking away.

She doesn't want to talk about this.'No, nothing illegal.' She shook her head and the reluctant moment pa.s.sed, she was smiling again. 'It's only that I'm a very private person. I need someone who knows how to avoid drawing attention to themselves.'