Another Life t-1 Read online

  Gwen let her eyes linger on him for a while instead of the street. Jack had told her once that he drank water because it kept him hydrated, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. Apart from what he wore, and a few minor and rather odd artefacts back at the Hub, Jack didn’t seem to own anything. He was tall and broad, a big presence physically and personally. And yet if he disappeared he would leave little evidence behind. Though he would leave a large gap in her life.

  A couple of months had passed since she’d first become aware of Torchwood, but it might as well have been a lifetime. Jack was like the ideal boss she’d imagined back in the force. When she did the right thing, he told her. When she screwed up, he told her that too. That didn’t make it comfortable, but it meant she knew what was expected, understood it, accepted it. No soft soaping, no bullshit. None of the fast-track bollocks she got from Inspector Morrison, no discussions about structured career paths for officers who showed ‘flair and potential’. No courses on assertiveness without aggression. And no listening to fellow officers like Andy, bleating about the inadequacies of the system, giving her grief about being overtaken by smartarse graduates who wouldn’t know an arrest form from their arsehole.

  She had no idea where this job with Torchwood was taking her. The more important thing was, she didn’t give a toss about that either. She only knew that she loved it. When had she last had to give evidence in court, escort a scumbag to the cells, go through the rigmarole of writing up a witness statement?

  She loved every day. She loved working with Owen and Toshiko and Ianto and Jack. Just now, she couldn’t conceive of leaving them. Couldn’t imagine Jack disappearing. Losing him.

  Jack sneaked a quick look at his watch, then at Gwen, then straight back to the street. ‘I don’t know whether to be flattered or irritated. Shouldn’t you be watching for our guy instead of watching me?’

  Gwen snapped her eyes back to the street, suddenly self-conscious. ‘Yeah.’ She fumbled for her palmtop computer, and called up the image that Toshiko had sent them earlier. The screen showed her a badly lit, flat-featured picture — a face with the rictus grin that characterised any security photo. Guy Wildman, early forties, grey suit collar to match his hair. What made him the killer of four vagrants in Cardiff?

  What made anyone?

  She and Jack observed the pedestrians flowing through the street. An old lady in a patterned headscarf hobbled along, a Tesco bag in each hand. A pinstripe suit beside her flicked a finger at the city types on the next table, who jeered a boozy chorus in response as he joined them. A blue one-man dustcart paused outside the café to empty a waste bin. Jack was on his feet immediately, getting an unobstructed view, shooing the driver on, watching the street beyond. Watching a tired woman struggle with a squealing preschool child along the opposite pavement. Watching two teenagers as they idly peered through a newsagent’s window, their shirt tails stuck out below their school pullovers and each with their backpacks slung low over one shoulder. Watching a bleach-blonde woman in a too-tight skirt and fuck-me shoes totter in the opposite direction with a supermarket trolley full of groceries. Watching a crumpled man thread his way through the thinning crowds on his way north. Watching him shoot looks to left and right. Watching him clasp his briefcase firmly in one hand, and clutch his collar tightly to his throat with the other.

  The man’s demeanour drew attention to him. He was short, maybe five foot six, broad rather than athletic. He was in a hurry, but trying not to look it. He was grey-haired, dishevelled, on a mission. The way he grasped his beige raincoat collar, it was as though the weather had already worsened and he was walking through a non-existent rainstorm. He was Guy Wildman.

  ‘That’s our boy,’ said Jack. He swerved around the dustcart, and manoeuvred into the street thirty metres behind the target. Gwen fumbled her palmtop computer into her jacket, and started after him. As she did, her sleeve caught the half-empty glass of lemonade. The glass fell, rolled across the table, and smashed on the pavement. The city types at the next table cheered and clapped sarcastically.

  Wildman heard the noise. Turned and saw Gwen.

  She flicked a look at Jack. Immediately cursed at her own tactlessness.

  Wildman was already looking back at Jack. Seeing Jack’s hand reach beneath his greatcoat for a weapon. A panicky look of disbelief. And Wildman darted into a side street and away.

  Jack was after him in an instant. Pedestrians scattered like a flock of startled pigeons as he burst through their midst.

  Gwen launched herself after him, half-colliding with the woman pushing the supermarket trolley. She ignored the woman’s stream of obscenities, resisted the temptation to stop and give her a hard slap, and chased down the narrow side street after Jack. She could see the tail of his grey greatcoat twisting behind him as he shimmied between a couple of shoppers. Far ahead of them, Wildman was rounding the next corner.

  As she approached it at a run, Gwen could hear angry shouts and swearing. She turned into the alleyway, and found half a dozen school kids gesticulating after the disappearing Jack. A ginger-haired lad had been knocked down in the rush. One of his friends was helping him to his feet again, and another was recovering his scattered ciggies from the gutter.

  ‘Watch where you’re fucking going,’ bellowed the ginger lad.

  Gwen hopped around them, still staring down the alley at Jack who was about to turn another corner. ‘Smoking can seriously damage your vocabulary,’ she told them before haring off down the alley.

  She had dropped well behind now, fifty metres at least. It was obvious from the way Jack was running that he’d taken out his revolver, a curiously old-fashioned pistol that he seemed to prefer to anything modern. And it was also apparent that he was unable to take clear aim at the fleeing figure of Wildman. Too many early evening pedestrians were wandering these side streets. A group of girls from a private school, incongruous in their expensive blazers, formed a buzzing crowd outside a clothes shop. Two business men walked in parallel but were oblivious to each other in their separate mobile phone calls.

  A couple of dusty construction workers laughed as they began to secure a makeshift door in the chipboard wall around a building site. Their appearance and manner told Gwen that it was the end of their shift. Their yellow hard hats were clipped to their belts and their fluorescent jackets were off their shoulders and hanging behind them from the waist. So they were unprepared for Wildman to barge straight at them. One he smacked with his shoulder, and the other caught a solid blow when Wildman swung the side of his briefcase into the man’s head. They stumbled aside, and Wildman pulled the door open again.

  The workmen staggered back to their feet and cursed him with the fluency of long practice. The younger man, a crew-cut teenager with a cauliflower ear, had taken the blow from the briefcase. He was attempting to seize Wildman by grabbing onto his beige raincoat when Jack approached at full pelt and yelled at him to step aside.

  Wildman struggled at the door, fumbling with the latch and open padlock. He glared at Jack, and seemed to convulse. From her perspective, still halfway down the alleyway from him, it looked to Gwen as though Wildman was going to be violently sick. She heard a plopping sound, and Wildman regurgitated a green-grey bolus at Jack. Jack stepped aside with a surprised yell, bumping into the two construction workers. Wildman took his chance in the confusion. He almost wrenched the door off its rusty hinges, and dived into the building site.

  The construction workers were staring at whatever Wildman had sicked up. It hadn’t splattered as it hit the ground. It just lay there, pulsing slightly. Jack reached out one foot, trod the thing into the dusty pavement. Then he kicked it through the door. He was briefly prevented from following it, as the two workmen grasped him by the arms. Jack shucked them off with a swift, violent shake of his shoulders. That’s when they saw his pistol, and they backed off, raising their hands.

  ‘Good choice,’ said Jack, and disappeared into the building site, still in pursuit of Wildman.

  Gwe
n pounded up the street to the door, and brandished her ID card.

  The older of the two workers stared at her. His wide round eyes were pale in the dirty brown leather of his face. Now he’d seen the ID, his manner was wary, less confrontational. ‘What’s going on here? That bloke’s not well. He was throwing up… what was that thing?’ The door was slightly ajar, and he was about to open it for a look, but Gwen pushed it shut again.

  ‘Well, this site isn’t safe to go wandering around in,’ persisted the workman. ‘I’ll have to let the gaffer know about-’

  Gwen dismissed his objections. ‘I don’t need your gaffer’s permission. I just need you to get out of the way. Anyone else in there? Anyone else arriving for another shift?’

  ‘We’re the last. All done for the day. Just locking up,’ said the younger man, eager to sound helpful.

  ‘But the floors aren’t all in yet,’ protested his older mate. ‘Not beyond the fifth, at any rate. And the external sheeting doesn’t go beyond that, either.’

  Gwen leaned right back, and stared up into the early evening sky. The building construction loomed over her, a vertiginous cliff of scaffolding and grey concrete. Far above, a dirty orange crane poked out above the top floor. Green fabric netting flapped in the breeze around the unfinished office block, a rippling sign announcing that it was a Levall-Mellon development.

  ‘The site manager’ll have my guts. I can’t be blamed if you lot get yourselves killed.’ The construction worker’s tone had changed completely now. Gwen recognised it from a dozen similar encounters with her new team. The people you encountered started out superior, arrogant. And when faced down by anonymous authority, they were cowed into submission. Or, like now, they started looking to offload the responsibility they’d made such a fuss about to start with. That’s when you knew they weren’t going to be a problem, because they no longer wanted that authority.

  She pointed to the yellow hard hat clipped to his waist. ‘I’ll need that,’ she said. He hesitated. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all day.’ She pulled the door open again. ‘Lock this behind me.’

  Beyond the chipboard barrier, it was gloomier than in the street outside. Gwen paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust. She tried the hard hat and found that the guy’s head was much bigger than hers. She gave up trying to adjust it, and placed the hat on the edge of a rusting yellow skip. The skip was half-full of rubble, grey chunks of broken wall and spiral scraps of concrete reinforcement steel.

  The thing Jack had kicked through the door had fetched up against the angled side of the skip. How had Wildman been able to spit that out, Gwen wondered. It had unfurled now, like a snot-coloured starfish with four legs. The thing quivered for a moment before it went stiff, leaking yellow bile into the grey dust.

  Gwen flipped open her palmtop computer, thumbed a fastkey, and dialled Toshiko at the Hub. ‘We’ve pursued Wildman down Blackfriar Way. Into the construction site. Wildman’s covered some distance since we spotted him.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Toshiko replied. ‘He must have made a miracle recovery. The reason we couldn’t get his secretary earlier was that she drove him home, because he wasn’t feeling well.’

  ‘Just an excuse, d’you think?’ asked Gwen. ‘A reason for them to sneak off for an afternoon shag?’

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Toshiko. ‘From what I can make out, Wildman is a bit of a sad bachelor. No suggestion that he’s got a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Or a close relationship with an animal.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that.’ Gwen eyed the dead starfish thing that Wildman had spat out at Jack. ‘There’s certainly something that’s not quite right with him,’ she said. ‘I’m going in to support Jack. Can you get police back-up to close off this whole area, and then get here yourselves?’

  ‘OK,’ confirmed Toshiko.

  ‘Was Mitch all right?’

  ‘Mitch?’ asked Toshiko.

  ‘The policeman at the pick-up.’

  ‘When did you start worrying about the police?’

  ‘I never stopped,’ Gwen told her. ‘So, was he OK?’

  ‘Didn’t notice,’ admitted Toshiko. ‘We were too busy scraping up bits of victim. Talk to you later.’ And she ended the call.

  Gwen could hear running on the floor above her. Shoes pounding and scraping on dusty concrete. She scanned this floor, and saw where they must have gone. She stepped through a gap in the wall where emergency doors would later be fitted, and looked up into the stairwell. Concrete stairs made a four-sided spiral up into the building. There were no rails in place, so she hugged the wall, staying well away from the edge where, flight by flight, the drop became sheerer and more disorienting.

  Her lungs were starting to burn as she approached the eighth floor. Beyond the next landing was the scuffling sound of shoes on concrete. Gwen she slowed her progress and peered out carefully.

  The early evening sun fell in a brilliant shaft of light, angled through the whole area. Concrete reinforcement wire poked out of blocks in the centre. Gwen blinked in astonishment. She could see through the unfinished floor, and again through the next three floors below that. On a cross-beam in the centre stood Jack. He was balanced, apparently unconcerned by the dizzying gap below him, with his pistol trained on the far side of this shell of a room.

  Wildman had picked his own way carefully over the fretwork of connecting girders, and now scrambled over the partly constructed exterior wall and onto the raised wooden and metal framework that surrounded the building. He had to use both hands to balance, and then to grasp the weathered steel of the scaffolding and hoist himself out onto the ledge. His beige coat no longer clung tightly to him. It rippled in the breeze that whistled through the carcass of the building. Gwen could see that the raincoat was actually too small for Wildman, and the arms had ridden up above his wrists to reveal the soiled cuffs of his grey suit.

  Wildman stood on the pale brown scaffolding platform. He turned to face Jack. The race up the building and the subsequent scramble across this floor had exhausted him. He took deep, desperate breaths of air. Several metres to his left a stretch of the zigzag laddering straddled the side of the building, an even more precarious route down than the unfinished emergency stairs. To Wildman’s right, the battered plastic opening of a long debris chute yawned ominously, ready to devour whatever was dropped in and to regurgitate it many floors below into another, unseen yellow skip. Wildman couldn’t seriously be considering either of those exits, thought Gwen.

  Jack must have been thinking exactly the same thing. ‘C’mon, Wildman,’ he called across to him. ‘Where are you gonna go from here?’

  Wildman peered behind himself, out across the city. While he did this, Gwen shuffled carefully into the room. She could now see through the skeleton of the building at this height, and a momentary nausea washed over her. She clutched at the wall to steady herself.

  When she looked up, she could see that Wildman was still staring out. The green fabric netting outlined this part of the building beyond the frame of scaffold poles, but through a gap in one section it was possible to see right out over Cardiff. They were high enough now to have a clear view, uninterrupted by nearby buildings. Streets criss-crossed their way towards the waterfront. There was the bronzed hump of the Millennium Centre. The glittering Bay reflected light between the moorings, and stretched out towards the barrage. Clouds were starting to roll in across the Bay, threatening rain from beyond the barrage and out into Môr Hafren.

  Wildman swivelled back around to consider Jack again, careful not to overbalance on the scaffold platform. Gwen could see now that the top of Wildman’s grey jacket was wet and dark. The vivid red splash on his white shirt indicated that this was blood. Wildman’s neck and face didn’t seem to be marked. Maybe he had somehow scraped himself in the chase up through the building. The coat wasn’t his either, it was now apparent. The position of the buttons were for a woman’s raincoat, and that explained why the sleeves were too short. Wildman was breathing more easily now, and smiling bro
adly. His smile wavered a little when he saw Gwen at the rear of the room, but he soon refocused on Jack.

  Jack had not moved from his precarious position in the centre. He held the pistol in a one-handed grip, unwaveringly pointed at Wildman. Jack’s other hand was at his side, the outside of his wrist against his hip. He knew Gwen was twenty metres behind him, even though she hadn’t spoken, had barely made a sound. He was waggling his fingers slightly, unseen by Wildman, to indicate that Gwen should stay back,

  ‘OK, so you checked out the view,’ Jack called to Wildman. ‘And you know you’re going nowhere.’

  Wildman cocked his head to one side, contemplating Jack. ‘That weapon is a fascinating item,’ he said. His voice betrayed no worry, just amused interest. ‘Is it an antique?’

  ‘It’s a Webley,’ Jack replied calmly. ‘Mark IV. Point three-eight calibre, and a five-inch barrel. More than enough to pick you off where you stand.’

  ‘Interesting. Where do you get the cartridges?’

  Jack’s aim didn’t falter. ‘What matters is where you might be getting one. Any moment now. Step back into the building. Away from the edge. Carefully.’

  ‘I think I’m safer where I am. Why don’t we just continue our chat right here?’

  Jack moved his head to one side, and Gwen could see him smiling grimly. ‘OK. So maybe we start with the obvious stuff. Like, what’s your connection to the deaths of four vagrants. The ones that were found within a few minutes walking distance from the offices of the Blaidd Drwg nuclear research facility?’

  Wildman tutted. ‘Shocking. I saw that on the news. We were all warned about it at the facility, of course. Wouldn’t want the staff to be harmed.’

  ‘No,’ snapped Jack. ‘No you weren’t warned. The murder of the vagrants didn’t make it to the media. We made sure of that. So you’re unusually well informed.’

  ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘And their deaths match the times that you were just about to enter work, or you’d just left. We checked your ID badge accesses at Blaidd Drwg. They all match.’