Another Life. Part 2

They rounded the front end of the bus. The windscreen was a crazed spider's web of splintered gla.s.s, with a long smear of blood down its full height. The diesel engine was still chattering away. And the crumpled remains of Guy Wildman lay sprawled under the front wheels.

'He was determined, this bloke.' Andy pushed his cap further back on his head, so that he could stare up at the building site and point. 'Eight floors down. Smacks into the top of the bus. Slides down the front. Bus doesn't stop in time. Finishes the job.'

A dark pool was spreading beneath the b.u.mper, like a target that had Wildman's head in its dead centre under the front of the bus.

'Sc.r.a.ped him along the tarmac for several metres.' Andy sucked air through his teeth, like a plumber appraising a quotation. 'I suppose we'll be left to shovel up the bits, as usual.' He shook his head. 'Anyway, high-rise suicide isn't very Special Ops, is it? I'd have thought you'd be more involved investigating all these vagrant murders. Serial killer, is it?' He obviously wasn't deterred by her silence. 'Can't you tell us anything, Gwen? Or aren't we a part of the team any more?'

'I would tell every one of you,' she said gently. 'Except then I'd have to become a serial killer myself.'

Andy studied her thoughtfully. 'I'm starting to believe that you're not joking when you say things like that.' He concealed his disappointment badly. 'Ah well, I'll get the forensics team out here.'

'Not this time, Andy.' Gwen felt that keen awkwardness again, the sense that she was clumsily rejecting her friends on the force, and couldn't yet find a graceful way to do it.

As if to underline this, Owen brusquely charged up to them. 'Are you coming, Gwen?' He had stopped right in front of Andy, like he didn't exist. 'Tosh is snapping on her rubber gloves, and you're not gonna want to miss this one.' Owen strode off around the bus.

Gwen shrugged a kind of apology at Andy. 'While we're on the subject,' she said as she turned to go, 'you don't want to talk about cleaning up if my boss is listening.'

Andy had the grace to look embarra.s.sed at this. 'Mitch? Yes, I heard about him chucking up at the scene.'

'I hope he'll be all right.'

'Not after the lads find out, he won't be. I reckon that he'll be over it by about... ooh, eight months? But you know what Mitch is like, he's a bit of a...' Andy trailed off, aware that Gwen was giving him a tight smile while looking meaningfully over his shoulder to the cordon. 'Ah, all right then. Well... Be seeing you.'

He turned on his heel and retreated, away from the scene of crime. Gwen wasn't sure whether she heard correctly, but she suspected he'd sarcastically added a murmured 'ma'am' before he went.

'Whoa! Whoa!' yelled Owen as Gwen reappeared at the front of the bus. 'No, not you, darlin'.' He stood up and banged on one of the unmarked parts of the windscreen. 'Tosh, what are you doing with that bus driver?'

Tos.h.i.+ko's head appeared through the driver's side window. 'He's in no fit state to drive.'

'You can b.l.o.o.d.y talk. Try reverse gear, would you? I want some of him left for the autopsy.'

There was a horrendous grinding of gears, and the whole bus seemed to shudder. With a further reluctant groan and a startling hiss of air brakes, the vehicle slowly moved backwards. From beneath the front of it emerged the gory mess of Guy Wildman. He must have hit the bus head first before crunching into the roadway and then being dragged along underneath for some distance before it stopped. Wildman's limbs were twisted into impossible angles. The shattered remnants of his head lay in a b.l.o.o.d.y pool that encircled it like a gruesome halo. There was so much blood that it created a reflective surface, in which Gwen could see the streetlights that had started to come on around the scene of the accident.

Owen considered the brutalised remains. 'This is going to b.u.g.g.e.r up the tourist trade again. They're only just getting over the death of Gene Pitney in that hotel across the way. Remember that? He was on tour in Cardiff, and dropped dead in his hotel room.'

'How awful,' said Gwen.

'I think something got a hold of his heart,' said Owen, still poking at the corpse. 'Not what the manageress had in mind when she told him that checkout was before 10 a.m.' He positioned a small daylight lamp beside the fresh corpse, and began snapping photographs on a digital camera.

Gwen had seen Owen at so many scenes of crime now, yet was still amazed by his detached view. She wondered if his disparaging att.i.tude was part of his training as a doctor, something that kept him separate from patients and relatives in the face of death, and now kept him sane amid the madness of what they did.

Tos.h.i.+ko joined them by the body. She'd given up trying to park the bus neatly, and had left it jack-knifed with two wheels across the opposite pavement. 'Nasty,' she said. 'Did he jump or was he pushed?'

'Suicide.' Gwen remembered Wildman's demeanour beforehand. So different from the panic he'd shown when fleeing from them in the street. 'He was absolutely calm,' she said. 'Smiling at us. He was ready when he finally jumped.'

'Jumped?' Tos.h.i.+ko was surprised.

'No,' Gwen corrected herself. 'He didn't jump. I've seen people jump before, it's a kind of last desperate act, once they've screwed up the... yeah, the courage courage to do it, I suppose. Wildman here, he simply let himself fall. Dropped off the eighth floor like he was collapsing backwards onto a bed.' to do it, I suppose. Wildman here, he simply let himself fall. Dropped off the eighth floor like he was collapsing backwards onto a bed.'

'Not what it looked like from down here,' Tos.h.i.+ko said. 'He screamed. Threw his arms about like he was trying to grab the air and hold on.'

'Flailing,' offered Owen. 'Thras.h.i.+ng about he was. Desperate.'

'It was only a few seconds, I suppose, but it sounded like...' Tos.h.i.+ko's eyes looked haunted as she recalled it. 'Well, like despair, I suppose.'

'Not straight away. He didn't start screaming until about halfway down.' Owen tucked the digital camera back in his jacket pocket. He stared at the corpse. 'Maybe you changed your mind, eh? No going back on that decision, mate. What got into you?'

Gwen didn't understand. 'How could you have noticed that? It must have been over in seconds.'

Tos.h.i.+ko pointed to their car. 'We'd located you with the heat sensor array in the SUV. So we knew that he was on the edge.' She indicated the protective shroud of material that protected the middle section of the Levall-Mellon site. 'Just as well. With all that green stuff covering the outside, we couldn't see into the building. And there's no CCTV in operation up there, either.'

'Nice explanation,' Owen told her. 'Refres.h.i.+ngly free from the techn.o.b.o.l.l.o.c.ks you usually give us.'

Tos.h.i.+ko scowled. 'Don't parade your ignorance, Owen, just because you don't understand the language.'

'I thought you preferred to speak C-minus.'

'That's C++,' she chided. 'I also know that Java is more than coffee. And that a.s.sembler has nothing to do with IKEA furniture.'

'All those languages, Tosh, and you still don't include English.' Owen put his arm around Gwen's shoulders and steered her so that they were looking up at the point from which Wildman had fallen. 'He was just there. We noticed you were further away. Jack was obviously the tall bloke in the middle, and you were the one with b.o.o.bs on the far side of the area. But never fear, freckles. If it had been you on the edge, I'd have been there to catch you. Falling for me, eh?'

She disengaged his arm from her shoulder. 'As if.'

'All the pretty girls do, y'know. Before they know it, I've swept 'em off their feet and they're lying next to me...'

Gwen rolled her eyes. 'The only way you'll end up lying next to a "pretty girl", Owen Harper, is if you're both knocked down by the same bus.'

Far from being disappointed, Owen leered at her. A moment later, it was like he'd already forgotten. He drew back the smeared raincoat to reach into the corpse's jacket pockets. This brief search produced a crushed wallet and an ID badge for the Blaidd Drwg nuclear research facility. 'We got the right bloke then.'

'I think "got" is putting a positive spin on it,' Jack called out from above them.

Gwen had left Jack back on the eighth floor when she'd hurried down to see what had happened to Wildman. Who knew what Jack had been doing up there since then. She remembered he liked to look out across the city at night from high vantage points, so maybe he'd been taking in the view up there while he had the chance. He must have decided to descend in style, because he was using the builders' lift down the side of the building. As it started to vanish slowly behind the chipboard barrier that surrounded the lower floor, he jumped onto the top of the wooden part.i.tion and then leaped the remaining seven feet to street level, agile as a cat.

'As interrogations go,' Jack concluded, 'it wasn't one of my best. Hey, who parked that bus there?' He cast a glance past it at the gathering crowd of rubberneckers. Further would-be eye witnesses were leaning out of upper-storey windows in adjacent buildings. 'I guess we could try and continue this here, but clearing this bunch of ghouls away is gonna be like trying to keep flies away from s.h.i.+t. Get him back to the Hub and do the autopsy there.'

'Oh great,' moaned Owen. 'We've got one corpse in the SUV already, and now we have to fit us and this carca.s.s in there too.'

'Quit griping. That car's deceptively s.p.a.cious,' Jack told him. 'Gwen and I will take the other vehicle.'

'Let me think,' Owen said, as though talking to himself out loud. 'Whose conversation will I enjoy more on the journey a dead guy's or Jack's?'

'See you back home,' Jack told him.

Gwen watched Owen's face darken as he twisted to watch Jack walk away. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.

She started after Jack Owen was still complaining to Tos.h.i.+ko. 'Let's get this stiff s.h.i.+fted. What I need is a really big spatula. And gloves. I hate it when I get bits of brain under my fingernails.'

FIVE.

Tos.h.i.+ko's attention flitted from monitor to monitor. The display frame on her desk in the Hub held six of them, each ill.u.s.trating some aspect of her a.n.a.lysis or showing the results of a search she'd initiated.

Gwen stood behind her, quietly watching. Tos.h.i.+ko didn't like to be studied, Gwen had discovered early on. She said it reminded her too much of her father supervising her homework. All that study didn't seem to have been wasted, Gwen wanted to tell her. This was Tos.h.i.+ko absolutely in her element, despite Owen's occasional disparaging remark about her 'geek chic'. Tos.h.i.+ko was a composer, with data as her music. She coordinated all the elements of her orchestral score, pulling them together until they made sense, so that everyone else heard the symphony and not a cacophony of unrecognisable noise. And, as with an orchestral performance, it was usually only when Tos.h.i.+ko presented the completed piece to them that they were able to recognise it. A masterpiece from the disorderly ma.s.s of information.

Tos.h.i.+ko's work station in the Hub appeared the same, a ma.s.s of random junk that seemed to make sense to her alone. 'Creative chaos' was how Jack had once described Tos.h.i.+ko's methodology, in an admiring tone that suggested the others could take a leaf out of her book. Not that he was any different on the desk in his office, amid the paperwork and old TV sets and bowls of fruit, she'd seen a dish containing fragments of coral, as though he was trying to grow it.

Tos.h.i.+ko's was the first station you saw when you entered the Hub a jumble of display screens, scribbled piles of paperwork, and a.s.sorted electronic parts. There was even a Rubik's cube that she could complete within a minute. Owen kept messing it up and dropping it back on her desk when she wasn't looking. She would infuriate him by somehow completing it each time, even when he'd peeled off and replaced several of the stickers. 'Teenage bedroom' was Owen's alternative description of Tos.h.i.+ko's desk.

Gwen cast a look over at Owen now, and saw him locating his keyboard amid the piled mess of his own desk, which was the next station along. He had the keyboard on his lap and was thumping at the keys. So unlike Tos.h.i.+ko's elegant touch typing.

Tos.h.i.+ko used a data pen now to annotate a couple of her displays. On the two screens to her left, a long list of names and dates scrolled past, almost too quickly to read, and certainly too fast to remember. On the right, the displays revealed Wildman's journey through the centre of the city, in the jerky stop-frame animation format of stolen CCTV images. The two smaller screens in the centre showed a combined satellite image of the area around the Blaidd Drwg office complex. Tos.h.i.+ko overlaid the local roads as a grid of white lines, and picked out the scene-of-crime locations as red dots. Gwen remembered the spreading pool of red in the roadway earlier, with Wildman's smashed head at its centre. These blood splashes on Tos.h.i.+ko's displays revealed the locations of his victims over the past week.

Gwen eased forward to get a closer look. Tos.h.i.+ko let out a little sigh of exasperation. 'You're dripping on me. Do you mind?'

'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.'

Tos.h.i.+ko 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 Tos.h.i.+ko 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 Pla.s.s opposite the Millennium Centre. Constantly flowing water cascaded like a s.h.i.+mmering 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, a.n.a.lysed it, p.r.o.nounced 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 could not die. He could feel pain, that was for sure he'd had one h.e.l.l 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, Tos.h.i.+ko 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. die. He could feel pain, that was for sure he'd had one h.e.l.l 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, Tos.h.i.+ko 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 Tes...o...b..g 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 gla.s.s 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 Tos.h.i.+ko and Owen were completing their initial work. The flicker of the lights had attracted Tos.h.i.+ko'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 Tos.h.i.+ko had been a.n.a.lysing.

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.

Tos.h.i.+ko joined them and sat quietly at the opposite end of the oval conference table. Her elfin eyes blinked through her gla.s.ses 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-s.h.i.+rt. 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 a.n.a.lysis that pinpoints Wildman,' Tos.h.i.+ko began.

'Round of applause for Dr Tos.h.i.+ko Sato,' Jack told the room. 'You know what "completed" means to her. Sometimes I think you'll never stop polis.h.i.+ng the apple, Tosh.'

Gwen and Owen grinned in appreciation. Tos.h.i.+ko 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.

Tos.h.i.+ko 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 n.o.body cares. That means that foraging wildlife might predate the bodies.'

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

'Of course.' Tos.h.i.+ko 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. 'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! 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.'