Free Doctor Who: Black Orchid by Terence Dudley

Digby?’
    ‘Digby, he also has gone.’
    ‘Digby?’
    ‘It was the night of the moon.’
    ‘That’s nonsense, Dittar, nonsense!’ She spoke with uncontrollable anger born of a terrible fear. Reproach was added to the sadness in the black eye.
    ‘Come with me!’
    Lady Cranleigh hurried away through a dense rose garden to a distant green house followed closely by the Indian. Inside the green house, submerged in the proliferation of tropical foliage, the frightened woman turned to the Indian who gulped greedily at the sweet warm air.
    ‘Now!’
    ‘I would come to you sooner,’ began the Indian apologetically, ‘but it was not safe until the ceremony... the ceremony of the dance of masks.’
    Gratitude closely followed by a sense of shame helped Lady Cranleigh to hold her fear in check. She drew courage from the quiet strength of the dignified Indian whose primitive roots she knew to be deeper than her own.
    ‘It was clever of you, Dittar. Thank you. But they must be somewhere.’
    ‘I have searched through the day. There is no sign.’
    She knew this to be true. If Dittar Latoni, Chief of the Utobi, could find no sign, there was no sign to find. And yet instinct told her there could be one place where the Indian had not searched. There were sacred areas in his own ancestor worship which bound him to respect that of others.
    ‘Have you looked in the attic?’
    ‘No, Lady.’
    ‘Then come!’
     
    4

The Doctor Makes A Find
    The unrelieved blackness and the rank, damp air somehow made it difficult to breathe. The Doctor wanted nothing more than to suck light air into his labouring lungs; it took preference over the satisfaction of his inordinate curiosity.
    When adventuring from his room he had concentrated his attention on the wall to his right in the belief that a possible exit would be in the opposite wall. Now he was returning to the point where his inquisitiveness had held him firmly by the nose he again concentrated his manual exploration on the wall to his right to balance the possibility of finding an exit point even if it meant no more than a return to his room.
    ‘Got it!’ The expression of triumph leapt involuntarily from his lips as a hair-thin line of light slashed his hand at head height. He had missed the unmistakable join in the woodwork on his outward journey for the reason that his sight had had no time to adjust. But his eyes had long since surrendered to a bottomless blackness that, alone, made it possible for him to see the light. Such is the nature of humility, he thought. He would remember that.
    All his fingers followed along the line of light probing for an irrelevance, an abnormality, something that contradicted the predictable. The little finger on his right hand found it; a thimble-sized knob that gave under pressure. A panel pivotted away from him with a groan and the Doctor stepped, gratefully, into a narrow corridor capped by skylights. Wherever he was he was directly under a roof.
    The corridor was narrow, narrower than the corridor where his own room was situated, and there were doors to either side. The Doctor tapped on the first, turned the handle and pushed, expecting the door to open inwards.
     
    Assuming the door to be locked he stepped away from it but the pressure of his hand dragging on the handle pulled the door open revealing a cupboard. It was stacked with books. The Doctor picked one up and then another, glancing at their spines. They were both botanical works.
    Further examination told him that all volumes were on botanical or geographical subjects. The Doctor inferred that they represented the stored library of the late Marquess who had died in the Venezualan jungle. He moved on to the next door which, again, proved to be a cupboard. This one contained articles of men’s clothing all neatly folded and stacked.
    The remaining cupboards contained more books and clothing and one was filled with sporting equipment: cricket bats, tennis-rackets and croquet mallets.