Chapter 33: Out of the Incinerator and into the Blast Furnace

I was standing in the office of the Master, who wanted me to help him and his demons destroy the world. He was arriving tomorrow, and he thought I was lying drugged on a bed next door, waiting for him to work his persuasive magic. I was not lying drugged on the bed because little, neat Miss Smallbone had managed to get a job as a maid in the Master’s American headquarters, and she had switched the drugs. She had sent me to the office to find out where the demons’ UK headquarters were, so… I didn’t know what exactly Miss Smallbone wanted to do about it, but she was the goodies, right? I was, through my panic, trying to be a brave soldier, rather than a terrified young barrister.

A terrified, nosy barrister. Because here I was, still riffling through the pages of the file. The demon headquarters, all along, had been in the chambers next door to my own in London’s South Square. We always wondered why 11B seemed to spend all its time having renovations done, and now I could see. The plans showed that the narrow staircase and twenty poky rooms were the tip of an underground iceberg, full of rooms called, ‘bunker,’ ‘shooting range,’ and ‘armoury.’ There was also a squash court. This shouldn’t have pleased me, but I hate squash and squash players for personal private reasons that I never reveal to anyone, which are that I once went out with a squash player for about a month, and he was really boring, and then, when I dumped him, I heard that he was telling other people that he’d dumped me because, ‘Things were never quite right in the bed department.’ Anyway, the plans were very interesting, even though the headquarters were ‘scheduled for demolition,' which I didn’t want to think about too hard. I memorised the address of the French headquarters also, in case it might prove useful, and the ones in New York and Madrid. The headquarters’ address was all Miss Smallbone had detailed me to find, but I was in the safe, so it seemed foolish not to find out what else I could.

Also, the second file was headed, MARY SUE PARK: CHOSEN ONE, and how could I possibly not read that? It was fat, and it was horrible. There were school reports, pictures of me at home as a child, pictures of me at uni, pictures of me in my current flat, pictures of me and Gavin, my murdered husband, and pictures of me lying drugged in my bed next door. There were constant banal little notes, of which the last was typical. ‘Target acquired,’ it read. ‘Target failed to succumb to reasoned argument. Master prohibited torture, for the time being. Master will subdue Target to his iron and icy will on Thursday evening. Master and Target to open Gates of Hell some time in next two days after that, presumably.’ It was not a reassuring document. I wanted to examine it more carefully, but there were others to get through, and it really wouldn’t do to be caught.

The next file was called ‘TARGETS.’ It listed and pictured the angels, as far as the demons knew who they were. Some, like Davina McCall and Ewan McGregor, had a large red stamp across their names saying, ‘DELETED.’ Some names had question marks indicating that the demons were unsure whether they were angels or not. Freddie Flintoff, who helped protect me in the firefight where Davina McCall was killed, had a question mark scrubbed out, and was now listed as ‘CONFIRMED.’ One thing which was sort-of-funny, in an awful way, was that there was a picture of David Mitchell the comedian next to a question mark. I had recently learnt that David Mitchell the comedian was a different person to David Mitchell the novelist, and it was David Mitchell the novelist who was an angel, and he really hated the fact that everyone confused him with David Mitchell the comedian. Still, this meant that maybe the demons would kill David Mitchell the comedian, who I’m sure is a nice person and everything, but he was not trying to save the world.
A special sub-section at the back of the file was devoted to David Tennant. It was sub-headed: OUR MOST DANGEROUS FOE! It was familiar stuff. I raced on to the next file, which was marked PLANS. A sheaf of paper fell out, entitled, PLAN FOR OPENING GATES OF HELL AND KILLING ALL THE ANGELS. But under the title was a red scribble saying, ‘Plans removed because of them being too secret. Order of the Master.’

I picked up the last two files, which had no titles, and just as I was about to open them, I heard footsteps outside in the corridor. Oh my God. What had I been doing? I immediately gathered all the files together, ready to stuff them back into the safe. But as I did so, from somewhere in the last two files, a photo slipped out and floated to the floor. It was such a surprising photo that I stared dumbly at it, stock still for a moment while the voices stopped at the door, and then some lifesaving instinct took over and I went into a zone of panicking efficiency. I rammed the files into the safe, sprinted through the window and along the balcony to my room, stuffed the plan of the building under my mattress and flung myself onto the bed at the very moment my door opened. As David Beckham entered, for whatever reason it was, I tried to control my heart and breathing, and wondered desperately why the Master’s safe might possibly contain a picture of Rollo Price, who I was once besotted with, who became a policeman, and who I didn’t think was in any way mixed up in this nightmare, except by the tangential accident of his being the first copper to have found me, David Tennant and my husband’s dead body. I still believed in coincidences? How stupid was I?