Chapter 41: Misplaced Trust

‘You’re alive!’ said Johnny Depp.

‘So it would seem,’ said the Teacher.

‘But…’ I said.

‘You’re ALIVE!’ said Johnny Depp.

‘Yes. And annoyed, since my plan for discovering the Master’s identity was ruined when Mary Sue decided to go walkabout. Explain yourself, Mary Sue.’

‘I heard you’d been captured and tortured to death.’

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘Who was it?’

‘Grainne Sand.’

‘Grainne!’ said Johnny Depp.

‘Yes. A very brave angel prepared to go to her death if the demons realised they’d been infiltrated.’

‘A suicide mission!’ I said.

‘This is a war, Mary Sue.’ The Teacher almost sounded tired. ‘Sacrifices are necessary sometimes. Grainne was there to pay the final price, and allow us to escape, which she did, but her sacrifice was wasted.’

‘I’m so sorry. But maybe you should have told me the plan.’

‘Maybe so,’ said the Teacher.

‘It wasn’t completely wasted. I did escape.’

‘Yes,’ said the Teacher. ‘I was both surprised and impressed by that. How did you do it?’

‘Well,’ I said, flattered, ‘it was like this. I…’

‘Actually, there’s no time. The key thing is for you to now land in London.’ Johnny Depp asked the Teacher to repeat this, since London was about to be blown up by a nuclear missile. ‘Land in London, Johnny. Trust me.’

I had trusted Gavin, my recently murdered husband. I never REALLY loved him, but still I married him because he seemed to be good enough, and it was time. When I say that out loud, I want to stab myself in the hand with a knife for being so stupid, but there it is. Whatever. That’s all beside the point, because while I didn’t LOVE Gavin, I did trust him. I absolutely did. But he was a demon who had wormed his way into my affections (I did feel affection for him ((tinged with pity (listen to me! What was I doing?!))), and even in addition to that very fundamental deception about his whole nature and purpose, he had sex with someone else at our wedding reception. Ergo misplaced trust. Then, also, I trusted Rollo Price, my old friend from university who became a policeman and acted like a knight in shiny armour when I was being questioned after David Tennant killed Gavin to protect me. But then I heard Rollo say it was all his tactics to get me to confess, and then I found Rollo’s picture in the headquarters of the people trying to make me destroy the world, and Rollo turned up at these headquarters when the evil Master was supposed to. Ergo misplaced trust. Among other people I have trusted are Johnny Depp, who at various points said I should be killed and he’d do it himself; my parents, who never told me I was a foundling; my so-called best friend at school, Hetty Winglass, who thought I was boring; and there are bound to be others but I worry there is a danger of my sounding self-pitying if I carry on. But a pattern begins to emerge. I wanted desperately to trust the Teacher. She was the leader of the angels who were, I was almost certain, trying to protect me. But she was saying, through the voice-disguiser that made her sound like a man, that we had to land in London even though a nuclear bomb etc. And there had been a time very recently when she kept me drugged so I wouldn’t be able to mess up her plan to find out who the Master was (though that fell through, unless the Master was Rollo). So, while I trusted her to do what she though was the best thing for the world, I could tell she was a leader, and prepared to make the hard decisions, and one of those might be to sacrifice me, since if I was dead, the Master wouldn’t be able to open the Gates of Hell, which sounded like the all-time worst-case scenario.

‘Please repeat instructions,’ said Johnny Depp again.

‘I don’t have time for this, Johnny.’

‘But…’

‘Unless the physical missile hits your plane, you will be safe. The warhead will not explode.’

‘But…’

‘I’ll explain very quickly, so don’t interrupt: after the Cuban missile crisis, I decided that nuclear weapons were really dangerous.’

‘Ok.’

‘So I disarmed them.’

‘How did you do that? How come you…’

‘Did I not ask you not to interrupt? And do you not remember that I dropped out of circulation for ten years in the late sixties and early seventies?’

‘Yes.’

‘What I was doing, with a very small team of assistants, was going to all the world’s nuclear facilities, and injecting the weapon cores with a cocktail of ion pacifiers, rendering their reactive plasma inert.’

‘That’s incredible. But what about new weapons?’

‘We have an ongoing programme of factory-based inertification, combined with a load of scientists I have bribed to get the maths wrong so that basically all nuclear weapons are duff these days.’

‘That’s incredible.’

‘So you said. But what do you think I was doing all that time? Now I need you to land in London and get Mary Sue to David Tennant. He goes to trial the day after tomorrow, and he needs her. I don’t know what the strategy will be, but the End of Days is coming, and this whole mess is part of it, and I need her to be where she needs to be, and where we can have a team of angels looking after her. And, while I know you two enjoyed it, it would be better if you don’t have any more sex with each other.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Come on, Johnny. I’ve got cameras in that batcave.’

‘What harm could it do?’

‘You have no idea, Johnny. Trust me.’