‘W HEREVER THIS C OCAINE HAS TRAVELLED, IT HASN ’ T GONE ALONE D EATH HAS BEEN ITS ATTENDANT D EATH IN A REMARKABLY VIOLENT AND INELEGANT FORM ’ The Doctor, Chris and Roz arrive at the Quadrant, a troubled council Block in Thatcher’s Britain There’s a new drug on the streets, a drug that’s killing to a plan Somehow, the very ordinary people of the Quadrant are involved And so, amidst the growing chaos, a bizarre trio moves into number 43 The year is 1987: a dead drug dealer has risen from the grave, and an ancient weapon is concealed beneath human tragedy But the Doctor soon discovers that the things people for their children can be every bit as deadly as any alien menace – as he uncovers the link between a special child, an obsessive woman, and a desperate bargain made one dark Christmas Eve RUSSELL T DAVIES is an award-winning TV dramatist, having created the controversial adult soap opera Revelations and the acclaimed BBC children’s serials Century Falls and Dark Season He loves Doctor Who, and all television T A D H V E E N N T E U W R E DAMAGED GOODS Russell T Davies S First published in Great Britain in 1996 by Doctor Who Books an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd 332 Ladbroke Grove London W10 5AH Copyright © Russell T Davies 1996 The right of Russell T Davies to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ‘Doctor Who’ series copyright © British Broadcasting Corporation 1996 Cover illustration by Bill Donohoe ISBN 426 20483 Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser For Mum and Dad, Janet, Susan and Tracy Thanks to: Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Abbott, Paul Cornell, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Maria Grimley, Rebecca Levene, Paul Marquess, Catriona McKenzie, Lance Parkin, Bridget Reynolds, David Richardson, Sally Watson, Tony Wood Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 21 Chapter 29 Chapter 41 Chapter 67 Chapter 81 Chapter 103 Chapter 119 Chapter 133 Chapter 10 141 Chapter 11 157 Chapter 12 179 Chapter 13 193 Chapter 14 199 Appendices 205 Chapter 24 December 1977 Bev lay awake, hoping that Father Christmas would come, but the Tall Man came instead She could hear his voice in the front room, but her mother’s crying drowned his actual words Mum had been upset all day, ever since she came home Her mother had different sorts of tears – mostly anger, like when the kids from the Quadrant threw cigarette butts through the kitchen window; like when Carl got lost in the crowd on Jubilee Day, except he wasn’t lost, he was drinking cider with Beefy Jackson’s gang; or like when Dad left But tonight, this was a crying Bev had never heard before Many years later, Bev would cry the same tears herself, and only then would she recognize what they meant Only then, when it was too late Bev got out of bed to listen She stepped over her Mister Men sack, as yet unvisited by Santa, and crept to the bedroom door Carefully, sucking her bottom lip, she edged the door open a fraction, wondering what she would if she saw another man threatening her mother She’d be cleverer than last time, that’s for sure Last time, two weeks ago, Bev had been woken by shouting – the voices of two men, both angry, but neither matching her mother’s fury Bev had run into the front room to find that one of the men had kicked the nest of tables into pieces He waved a table leg in the air, threatening Mum Bev threw herself at the second man – she only came up to his waist – and punched him with soft fists He laughed, took hold of the collar on her cotton nightie and slapped her face He wore a big, jewelled gold ring which tore open the skin on her cheek Bev hardly remembered the slap Her most vivid memory was of the sound of her nightie ripping, and she thought, it’s new, it’s brand-new last week and cost Mum a packet and she’s gonna kill me for getting it ripped She was bleeding as she fell to the floor, and that seemed to change things Both men suddenly looked ashamed Better still, Mum was in a Temper, and when she was in a Temper, no one stood a chance Despite the pain now burning her cheek, Bev actually laughed as Mum grabbed the table leg off the first man and threw it away, then seized hold of his arm and pushed him towards the door The second man stepped forward, but Temper made Mum bigger somehow, made her able to take hold of both men at once and shove them on to the walkway outside She slammed the door shut The two men called out all sorts of threats – they were shouting about money, it was always about money – but without their earlier conviction Now, they sounded like little boys name-calling Mum walked over to Bev, picked her up and hugged her, smearing her own face with Bev’s blood, and started to cry That, Bev thought later, was a shame Temper made Mum magnificent, but when she cried, it was as though she had lost And tonight, Christmas Eve, Mum must have lost very badly indeed, because she could only cry Bev could see her through the gap between door and jamb Mum was sitting in the brown tartan armchair, her shoulders heaving as she wept This time, Bev did not run to her mother’s side – not out of fear of being hit again, although the scar on her cheek was still a livid red This time, Bev did not dare interrupt This time, the Tall Man was there Holding her breath, Bev inched round to see him The front door was open and he filled the rectangle of night He was almost a silhouette, but enough light spilled from the kitchen to pick out slices of clothing – along coat, jacket, tie, all in contrasting shades of black, his white shirt shining in two sharp triangles His face was obscured, because of Mr and Mrs Harvey The Harveys owned the flat on the opposite side of the Quadrant, and every year, Mrs Harvey would fill her frontroom window with fairy lights Not just one set, like those Mum had strung around the gas fire, but at least a dozen separate strands, woven into an electric cat’s cradle The different sets, each in a different colour, blinked at different times and at different speeds, and Bev would stare and stare in the hope that one day she would see a pattern, a sequence hidden within the tiny barbs of light, a secret that only Bev would know But she never succeeded The lights flickered on and off, apparently happy in their random chase, and if they had a secret, they kept it safe Now, the Tall Man stood in a direct line with the Harveys’ display on the opposite walkway, and such was his height that the lights danced around his head in an inconstant halo They seemed to draw all illumination away from the Tall Man’s face, as if they had entered into his conspiracy and kept him in darkness The Tall Man did not move, but he spoke His voice was a whisper, low enough to keep the exact words from Bev In that whisper there was a terrible sadness, as though he spoke things to Bev’s mother that must surely break her heart Then he finished talking and stood there, unmoving Bev watched, waiting for something to happen, but for a long time, nothing did Mum stayed in the Jacob Tyler left his wife in June 1977 He knew that she was pregnant, but made no effort to pay his debts Quadrant27787 often assumes they were divorced; they were not After his wife’s death, he applied to the courts to be given Winnie Tyler’s accounts In November 1988, he was granted the £30,000 plus eleven years’ interest With his brother John, he invested in a security firm in Leeds It was a moderate success He remarried in October 1996 There is a new Mrs Tyler and Tyler children Now retired and comfortable, Jacob Tyler has not once visited his son Gabriel Finally, the diaries Eva wrote at Steven Jericho’s bedside are difficult to read – they vary from formal accounts to illegible scrawls But various references are made to a Sally Hunt I’ve researched this, and while this information doesn’t vindicate Eva – quite the opposite, you might argue – it shows how the nightmare of Quadrant27787 started long before the Jericho and Tyler families came together Sally Hunt was a schoolgirl at St Barnabas, in the same year as Eva Dalloway In the summer of 1963, on the last day of term, Sally Hunt was found unconscious on the canal path She had been beaten with a blunt object, perhaps a brick She regained consciousness and told police that her attacker came from behind and could not be identified The report indicates that she may have been lying, obeying a schoolgirl rule which dictated that no girl should betray another Sally’s knuckles were bruised, indicating that she did fight back, though she denied this Sally Hunt seemed to recover She was taken home to her parents in Knightsbridge She later collapsed from a subdural haematoma, a result of the attack She lost the power of speech and the use of her right side Her parents looked after her until the mother’s death in 1998 Sally Hunt was moved to a private nursing facility She lives there still 208 ... witness to events in the Quadrant at tea past two on that fine summer’s day would testify that, somehow, it was the Simon Jenkins of old, not the Capper, who stood at the centre of the courtyard... from left to right, uncertain of their correct position But this wasn t what brought Harry back to reality Rather, it was the fact that he now recognized the creature Harry looked at the Capper,... weight on to her left leg to get a better view, just in time to see Mum putting on her overcoat She was going out And for the first time Bev felt properly frightened The Tall Man had unsettled