The Doctor frowned at her. 'Ha! Several hundred! No! Only thirty-seven. Not bad for this old thing,' he added, patting the console. The shutters on the scanner screen opened with a low hum.
'Oh great!' said the American, 'A slum! A dirty old slum! I might as well go and get changed...' She started for the inner door of the TARDIS when the Doctor put his hand on her shoulder.
'Your mode of dress is still suitable, Miss Brown.' His tone changed. 'Hear that signal?'
Peri nodded.
'Puzzling isn't it? There's something going on here,' he said, his eye caught a small crowd growing on the screen, 'and it looks like there's something else going on here too...' His hand flipped the red door control upwards and vanished through the large double doors before they had fully opened. Peri sighed, lifted her skirt a little, and ran after the Time Lord.
The policeman slowly turned away from the dead body having draped his regulation cape across the blood speckled face. Horrible, but something that was becoming distressingly commonplace nowadays. 'Please keep back,' he implored the curious crowd that was growing by the minute. 'The poor girl doesn't need an audience...' He stopped as he noticed a needle workers nightmare walking through the crowd, flashing a rectangular piece of card as he came.
'Excuse me...excuse me..thank you. Excuse me,' The Doctor neared the police officer who, quite rightly regarded him with something rapidly approaching suspicion. He smiled and flashed the card for the millisecond. 'Smith, special branch.' he said.
'Plain clothes division, sir?' the policeman asked. 'And I'm sorry sir, but how can you smile when this has happened, I don't know.'
The Doctor looked down at the cape-covered shape, the dried blood on the cobbles matt and reflectionless and bending down, lifted the edge of the cloak. 'Knife attack?' he asked, a grim, troubled expression replacing the smile.
'Yes, sir. The sixth in recent weeks...but you probably know that. It's a terrible world we live in...'
It's going to get a lot worse too, thought the Doctor. He turned to see Peri hovering on the edge of the crowd, her eye having caught the blood. The crowd were intently staring at her and her fancy clothes. 'Ahhh, my assistant, Miss Brown.' Peri took one step forward.
'What's going on, Doctor?' she questioned. The policeman frowned.
'Well naturally,' said the Doctor to the policeman, 'I'm a qualified doctor too. Very useful when it comes to treating Foot and Mouth...' He shot Peri a quick glance which was fully understood, buttoning her lip.
The Doctor fully knelt down, yellow trousers contrasting with the thick red across the ground. Something else red...glittering...taking a pair of tweezers from his pockets, he picked out of the coagulate, and held it up to his eye line. A small piece of a jewel...can't have been anything this poor girl owned, no ruby this...yet, it's construction...
'What have you found, sir?' The policeman was bent to the Doctor's ear, his hand over his mouth as the smell from beneath the cape rose to meet him.
The Doctor remained silent, his eyes slightly closed, his mind working overtime. 'I...' He snapped back to reality, and stood up. 'I have some tests to perform, so if you'll excuse me...can you make all the necessary arrangements?' he said to the policeman, his gaze flitting back to the corpse.
'Already done, sir.'
'Good man. I'll be in touch.' and with that, the Doctor strode through the crowd, Peri following in his wake, asking a thousand questions.
'Go home,' the policeman wearily told the crowd. 'There is nothing to see here.'
From the shadows of one of the many alleys that shot from the main street, Jeremiah Hardstaffe watched the strangely dressed newcomer depart from the scene of the crime with his companion.
Back in the sanctuary of the TARDIS, her stomach settled and her head cleared, Peri put down her mug of tea and called through the inner door to the Doctor, 'Who could have done that to that poor girl?' her voice shaking with anger and unease. The Doctor strode back into the console room, clutching a battered black case. Opening it, he took out an old violin and ragged bow.
'Can you play the violin?' he asked quizzically, raising it to his chin and scraping a few discordant notes from the instrument.
'No,' she replied, ' and neither can you by the sound of it.'
'Shame,' he said, putting it back into the case and shutting the lid. 'It helps me concentrate.'
Peri shook her head. First it was Inspector Smith, now it was Sherlock Holmes.
The Doctor froze in his tracks and looked up slowly. 'What date did I say it was?'
'You didn't,' came the reply, 'you only said it was thirty-seven years late for the...'
'...opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, I know...it must be 1888...' his voice trailed off, his eyes darkened.
'1888? What's so special about that date?'
The Doctor looked down at her as she drank her tea. '1888, Peri. Don't you see?' His companion's blank expression was the only answer he needed. 'We're in London with two problems. The first is the signal we were picking up earlier...'
'And the second?'
The Doctor fixed her with a steely gaze. 'The second, my dear Peri, is that we are in London at the time of Jack the Ripper.'
iv) Turalium
The field was no more than five minutes from London, and the brightly coloured but tatty tent sat smack in the middle of it. The entrance was parted wide open and a large crowd began to make its way inside, stopping only to grab their tickets from Morris as he sat in a small wooden shack painted with faces of the freaks they were paying to see.
'Look at this crowd,' Hardstaffe said, rubbing his hands together and eyeing the growing stack of pennies, 'We're really pulling them in tonight.'
( Elsewhere, the black clad figure moved silently around the glowing technological womb, a hand-held device in his gloved hand. A code was tapped into the small keypad. In the tent, in one of the black rooms where one of the tent, in one of the back rooms where one of the exhibits was housed, a complex looking system on the door of its cell clicked several times before giving a decisive beep. The door swung open, and the only occupant left the room, heading away from the sounds of the approaching crowd.)
'That's it, roll up, only a penny, gotta be worth it!' shouted Hardstaffe, taking over from the weakly Morris as ticket seller, knowing his more extroverted nature would get the crowds roused. Money and small scraps of paper were exchanged, people and more people went into the tent. Battling his way against them to get to Hardstaffe came Morris, his face a mask of fear.
'He's gone again! The door to his bleedin' room wide open! That nutter has got out again!'
Hardstaffe grabbed the little man by his lapels, and spat into his face, 'What do you mean? These people are here to see him!'
( Somewhere else, the gloved hand pressed a glowing red diode on the remote display. 'You have served your purpose,' the suave voice said, 'you can go now.' The button was pressed.)
Hardstaffe stopped mid-rant, his eyes suddenly glazed. Morris, a second ago chocking in his grasp, felt the tight fingers slacken. 'Mr Hardstaffe? You alright?'
Hardstaffe didn't reply. Expression fixed, a string of saliva hanging from his lower lip, the big man fell backwards, taking the whole wooden shack with him, quite dead.
'He's dead,' muttered Morris, stumbling backwards. 'He's dead!' he said to the crowd, grabbing sleeves and staring wildly. But the crowd continued to enter the tent, pushing now that they realised they didn't have to pay to see the show.
The Doctor closed his left eye and leant towards the electron microscope in the TARDIS laboratory. The machine scanned his retina in a single second pass and automatically focused onto the fragment of red crystal on the slide below.
Peri sat in a high backed wicker chair on the other side of the room, idly toying with an apple stalk between bites of the fruit. 'So what is it? A ruby?'
'Mmm?' was her only reply. She didn't bother repeating the question, she knew she would only get an answer when he was good and ready. The Doctor stood up and smiled - he was good and ready.