Another Life t-1 Page 4

  ‘Sorry.’ Gwen stepped back again. ‘The rain started before we got back to the car. Took us a bit by surprise. It had looked so nice earlier in the day. Wasn’t in the forecast.’

  Toshiko spun around on her stool. ‘Look, why don’t you get settled in the Boardroom? I’ll pipe the results up there in a few minutes.’

  Gwen nodded. ‘OK.’ Better leave Toshiko to it, she thought. She made her way down the short flight of steps that led to the walkway across the shallow basin. She was still amazed by the way the Hub was aligned with the surrounding area above ground. A clue was the tall stainless-steel pillar that reached from the basin up to the distant ceiling, where it continued up another seventy feet beyond the pavement of Roald Dahl Plass opposite the Millennium Centre. Constantly flowing water cascaded like a shimmering curtain on all sides of the pillar. The base had started to turn green with algae, yet the Hub neither felt nor smelled damp. The basin itself seemed to rise and fall with the tide. Once they had found a bream flapping about in there, lost and forlorn until Owen had caught it, analysed it, pronounced it fit to eat, and cooked it in the Hub’s kitchen on the upper level. This had briefly earned him the nickname ‘Harry Ramsden’.

  Gwen met Jack at the top of the spiral staircase that led up to the Boardroom. He was still wearing his greatcoat. Rainbow spots of rain stood out on the collar and shoulders, strangely illuminated in the irregular light of the Hub. He stared out over the main area, evidently enjoying the sight of his team busy at work.

  ‘Saw you talking back there with the policeman…’

  ‘Andy?’

  ‘Yeah. He giving you a hard time?’

  ‘No, not at all.’ Gwen considered how she’d felt talking to Andy in the alleyway. Or not talking to him, more like. ‘Sometimes I just hate keeping secrets. Sometimes I wish people wouldn’t tell me them, then there’s no pressure. Know what I mean?’

  ‘Part of the job,’ he told her.

  ‘My mum used to say you shouldn’t keep secrets from your friends. If you can’t trust your friends, who can you trust?’

  ‘No point wrapping your birthday presents then!’

  Gwen laughed. ‘Ah, that wouldn’t be a secret. She’d say that counted as a “surprise”.’

  ‘And the difference would be…?’

  ‘A surprise is something you tell everyone about. In the end. You can’t have a surprise party if no one turns up.’

  Jack laughed too. ‘And a secret is something that you tell people about one friend at a time?’ He watched her thoughtfully. He scratched his forehead with his forefinger, and his pale eyes never left hers. ‘Do you share your secrets?’

  Gwen knew what he meant. She’d seen him shot through the head and survive it. Heard him talk about some unexplained incident that meant that he could not die. He could feel pain, that was for sure — he’d had one hell of a headache for days after that shooting incident, even though there wasn’t a mark on him now. She didn’t know how safe he was; whether a disease or a catastrophic accident or being consumed by fire would be enough to carry him off for good. But more than that, only she knew about this. Ianto, Toshiko and Owen had no idea. Jack hadn’t explicitly asked her to keep his secret — he simply seemed to know that she would. An unspoken understanding.

  Jack was still studying her reaction. ‘And what about Rhys?’

  What about him, she thought. Every day she was keeping things from her boyfriend. She couldn’t tell him the truth about Torchwood. He didn’t understand why she was always on call, day and night. And he never asked her about it. Another unspoken understanding. Or was it? By not talking, how could she be sure?

  ‘Don’t lose track of your own life,’ Jack told her. ‘You mustn’t let it drift away. Torchwood can consume everything. Everyone…’

  His voice trailed off. He’d seen Ianto, their receptionist, walking up the spiral staircase. Ianto was about her age, maybe a few years younger, and not bad-looking, she decided. She hadn’t worked him out yet. He seemed happy to do the more mundane work in Torchwood — the fetch-and-carry stuff, whether that was a Tesco bag full of shopping or body bag full of Weevil.

  He was headed for the coffee machine, and smiled in recognition as he spotted them leaning against the balcony rail. ‘Sorry, didn’t see you there.’ He waggled a freshly rinsed coffee pot at them. ‘I was about to get fresh.’

  Jack smiled at this comment. He shrugged off his coat, and draped it over the rail. ‘Ianto, you’ve anticipated my need for something warm and wet.’

  Ianto rolled his eyes theatrically. ‘Very amusing, sir. I should have guessed that, whatever I say, you’ll always want to top me.’

  ‘You wish,’ Jack told him. He gestured for Gwen to follow him through the glass doors into the Boardroom. ‘We’ll take it in here, Ianto. Thanks.’

  They tripped the motion detectors as they went in, and the strip lights blinked on. Gwen looked down across the Hub, past the steel column and its sheen of flowing water, to where Toshiko and Owen were completing their initial work. The flicker of the lights had attracted Toshiko’s attention, and she gave Gwen a cheery thumbs-up to indicate that she was almost ready.

  At the same moment, there was a buzz of power as the wall-mounted plasma screen behind Gwen faded into life. The big screen was quartered, and Gwen recognised several of the images as being those that Toshiko had been analysing.

  She and Jack spent a few minutes considering the images. Again, the red blobs on the map recalled the spatters of Wildman’s blood on the bus at the most recent SOC.

  Toshiko joined them and sat quietly at the opposite end of the oval conference table. Her elfin eyes blinked through her glasses at the PDA she’d carried in with her.

  A minute later, Owen was clattering up the metal stairs to join them, late as usual. He was still wearing his white lab coat over his crumpled t-shirt. Seeming to realise this, he peeled off the coat, spotted that there was nowhere to hang it, and bundled it under the table before taking his seat.

  They settled into their places around the table, while Ianto delivered the fresh, steaming coffee to murmured thanks from everyone.

  ‘So I think I’ve completed the movement analysis that pinpoints Wildman,’ Toshiko began.

  ‘Round of applause for Dr Toshiko Sato,’ Jack told the room. ‘You know what “completed” means to her. Sometimes I think you’ll never stop polishing the apple, Tosh.’

  Gwen and Owen grinned in appreciation. Toshiko blushed prettily.

  ‘I cross-correlated the locations for the deaths of all the vagrants.’ She displayed a list of names on the main screen. A substantial minority showed only as ‘A. N. Other’. She continued: ‘Now, it’s not unusual for vagrants to drop down dead, even at this time of year when the weather’s still quite warm. So I obviously eliminated the less dubious cases.’

  ‘Any of them that hadn’t had the backs of their neck and skull chewed off,’ Owen said.

  Toshiko frowned at him. ‘Not exactly. These victims aren’t exactly missed and mourned. No one’s looking for them. They’re already missing, so they can drop down dead and nobody cares. That means that foraging wildlife might predate the bodies.’

  ‘Eww,’ said Gwen. ‘Predate? Like predatory? You mean, eat them?’

  ‘Of course.’ Toshiko tapped at her PDA screen with a stylus. The main screen in the room flashed up a shorter list of the names. ‘The victims we’re interested in have had their heads chewed by human teeth. There’s no connection with where they live. Or used to live, I should say. Some of these addresses are from many years ago.’

  Owen stood up to look at the screen more closely. ‘Bloody hell! Look at all these Welsh place names.’ He wrinkled his nose at Gwen. ‘Don’t you people use vowels? It’s like the English town planners finished naming all our places, and your lot had to use all the left-over letters in the box.’

  ‘Gwirionyn,’ Gwen told him. ‘As my nan would say.’

  ‘Bless you,’ retorted Owen. ‘I mean, look at this. Ho
w do you even pronounce this one?’

  ‘That’s Ystradgynlais,’ Gwen said. ‘It’s up north somewhere, I think. How have you got all this, Tosh?’

  Toshiko looked pleased to be asked. ‘Cross-match of the DNA analysis with their NHS record.’ She called up another screen of information, this time a map of the whole Cardiff area. There were two clusters of red dots, and one solitary dot at a distance from them. She indicated the largest cluster. ‘As you can see, these are all within easy access of the Blaidd Drwg offices. There’s one isolated similar case out in the Wetlands Nature Reserve, from some days previously. And then there’s a smaller cluster here. The nearest things to that are a tourist centre, an army training camp, and the market town of Cowbridge.’

  ‘Excellent work, Tosh.’ Jack was clearly pleased. ‘The larger cluster is pretty conclusive: Wildman is our guy.’

  Gwen said: ‘Couldn’t someone else have been using his security card to badge in and out? Set him up for this?’

  Toshiko shook her head. ‘It was a card-plus-thumbprint system.’

  ‘He still has both thumbs,’ said Owen. ‘Nobody borrowed one from him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t matter,’ rejoined Toshiko. ‘Contour of the skin distorts once a digit gets severed. Print would be imperfect.’

  Gwen saw Jack smile indulgently at this competitive exchange. ‘OK,’ he said loudly. ‘We need to see if anything ties Wildman in with the other cluster. Mr Harper, what have ya got?’

  ‘Doctor Harper, if you don’t mind.’ Owen sat up straighter in his chair, as though the teacher had picked him out to answer a particularly tricky question in class. He flipped open the top of his laptop and thumped at the keys to get his information displayed on the plasma screen. He seemed to be directing his explanation at Gwen now. ‘Done some prep work for Wildman’s autopsy. No knife work yet, but a load of scans to be going on with. They show evidence of osseous tissue in the upper gastrointestinal tract, but nothing much beyond the pyloric antrum.’

  Gwen was amused to hear Jack and Toshiko both start to fake a coughing attack. Owen scowled at them, and resumed his explanation to Gwen. ‘Or, to put it simply…’

  ‘He swallowed a whole load of bony bits,’ interjected Jack.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ said Owen.

  ‘I’m betting,’ continued Jack, ‘that Wildman’s stomach will contain blood and skull fragments and brain fluid from at least three different DNA sources.’

  ‘The clue will be what was most recently ingested.’ Owen pummelled some more keys on his computer. Fresh images expanded on the wall display. The photos showed Wildman’s bloody remains, somehow starker and more brutal when laid out on the cold metal of the examination slab. The face was a pinkish-grey mush.

  ‘I may never eat strawberry yoghurt again,’ Gwen said.

  Owen seemed to be enjoying her discomfort. ‘You should see him when I’ve sliced him open. Then we’ll see if his stomach contains DNA evidence from the other vagrant victims. The one’s who were… what was the word again Tosh? Predated.’

  Jack leaned forward on the conference table. He poured himself another slug of Ianto’s coffee. ‘Think there’s gonna be a more recent victim’s DNA in Wildman’s stomach. One that isn’t on your chart yet, Tosh. I saw Wildman’s face before he bounced it off that bus. Before he took the drop. Looked to me like spinal fluid all down his clothes. Messy eater.’ He took a big slurp of his coffee. ‘Y’know, the worst thing about being bitten to death like that? It’s not a clean death, because the Welsh have such terrible teeth.’

  Gwen defied this slur with a big, insincere smile. ‘Where’s the latest victim?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Dunno. Looked like Wildman had been snacking pretty recently. Probably another vagrant, but in the city centre. Any news on the police frequency, Tosh?’

  Toshiko performed a staccato rhythm with the stylus on her PDA. ‘I’ve put a trace on.’

  ‘A vagrant would be good,’ nodded Owen. ‘No need to provide a cover story for their disappearance.’

  His casual tone enraged Gwen. She felt her neck and face flush with anger, and heard her own words almost before she knew she was saying them. ‘Vagrants are people too, Owen.’

  ‘Hark at her.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me! For all we know, another poor lad is lying dead in a gutter. Unfound at the moment. Unnoticed, certainly. Real people like you would just walk past him, even when he was alive. Maybe he was selling the Big Issue in town. Or maybe he was just wandering around trying to find somewhere to kip for the night, and the first time it looked like anyone was showing him any attention was when Wildman approached him, and that was the last thing he ever knew.’

  ‘I’m just saying,’ insisted Owen, ‘it’s not like Tosh is gonna struggle to conceal the death of some chewed up pikey when he turns up in a gutter somewhere in Grangetown.’

  Gwen slapped both hands on the table, an alarming sound that echoed off the glass walls of the Boardroom. ‘How can we know what made him come to Cardiff, this poor bastard we’ve not even seen yet? How can we say that his family aren’t somewhere out there, somewhere else in Wales, or further out? Wondering if he’s all right. Not knowing if he’s alive, but praying that he is. Not knowing that he died today.’ She blinked hard, and looked up at the strip lights in the ceiling to stop the tears. She wouldn’t give Owen that satisfaction. ‘Unfound? Unnoticed? Yeah. But unmissed? I don’t think so.’

  Owen leaned across the table to her, uncowed. ‘When you’ve been here a while longer, you’ll see it differently. I mean it. I’ll ask you again in a couple of months’ time, you’ll have changed your tune. I mean, I honestly hope I’m wrong about that…’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Toshiko said quietly.

  ‘No,’ admitted Owen after barely a pause. ‘I don’t.’

  Jack stood up. It was a casual gesture, and he made it look as though he was pulling together their cups and putting them back on the tray. But by doing so, he leaned over the table towards each of them. It was an elegant gesture of control, reasserting his authority. Calming the room.

  He smiled across the table at Owen. ‘Good job on the initial scan.’

  Toshiko’s PDA interrupted him with a beeping alarm. ‘Search result,’ she said, and put it up on the main screen. ‘Police report that matches our interest profile.’

  ‘Result indeed,’ Jack observed. ‘They’ve found Wildman’s car. Now where did I put my coat?’ Gwen pointed through the glass door to where she could see it on the railing outside. ‘OK, good, thanks. Tosh, here’s another search I’d like you to run.’ He slipped a folded piece of paper across the table to her. She looked at it briefly, nodded, and put the paper in a pocket alongside her PDA. ‘Owen, let us know what else you find after you’ve opened Wildman up.’

  And with this, Jack was off through the Boardroom door, beckoning for Gwen to join him.

  She caught up with him at the foot of the spiral staircase. ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘The car wasn’t empty,’ he told her as they approached a solitary paving stone that lay incongruously in the floor of the Hub. ‘It pains me to tell you this, Gwen, but I don’t trust your former colleagues to handle this well.’

  ‘You can feel pain then,’ she said to him.

  He stood on the slab, and held out his hand to her. ‘Not according to my exes.’

  Owen retrieved his coffee from the table. It was just warm enough. He took it over to the glass window of the Boardroom, where he could stare down and watch Jack cross the floor of the Hub. Gwen was skipping down the stairs after him, like an eager puppy.

  She’ll learn, thought Owen. The magic wears off eventually. It’s a great job — the best he could imagine. But it was never quite the same after the first six months.

  Toshiko was still busy at the table, tapping away on her PDA with that pen device. She was eager too, keen to complete Jack’s latest request.

  Owen thought about Wildman’s corpse, ready for him over in the pathology room. He s
ipped at his lukewarm coffee, and decided that the stiff could wait.

  He pushed open the far door of the Boardroom and strolled out onto the balcony. The noticeboard on the back wall had a cluttered collection of yellowing newspaper clippings pinned to it, along with cartoons, photos and leaflets. One polaroid showed him and Toshiko, grinning at the lens held at arm’s length. It was from outside the Castle. He’d got bored of having the photo stuck to the front of his dishwasher by a magnet, so he’d brought it in and half-hidden it on the board behind some money-off coupons for Jubilee Pizza. Toshiko hadn’t noticed yet.

  By sitting in one of the metal chairs on the balcony, Owen could see Jack making his way to the exit platform. With a grinding sound far above them, a corresponding flagstone slid out of its place to create a square opening.. A handful of lights in the Plass twinkled on the steel tower, visible through the distant gap.

  With a thrum of power, the hydraulics began to power the platform upwards. He could see Jack holding Gwen’s waist to balance her on the square stone podium. She was staring up into his eyes, engrossed in whatever he was telling her, favouring him with that gap-toothed smile of hers. The two of them were so preoccupied that they were both oblivious to Owen observing them, even when the lift drew level with him at the height of the balcony. It was like he was invisible.

  Owen watched them draw further away from him, disappearing, leaving him behind. He saw them duck briefly, and laugh together. For a moment, he wondered why.

  Then the first fat blobs of rain dropped from the open portal, blew over the balcony, and splashed into Owen’s upturned face. It felt like he’d been spat on. He shook the drops off.

  Toshiko joined him on the balcony. ‘Design fault,’ she tutted. ‘I mean, have you seen the leaves that get blown through there? Not so many birds flying in these days. Not since Jack uncaged the pterodactyl.’ She was laughing, pointing to where the raindrops had spattered on Owen’s shirt. ‘Nasty weather tonight. There’s a storm brewing.’

  Owen narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Yeah, and I’m starving. Not going out in that lot, so I think we get something delivered.’