TWO
‘People live here,’ Jack Harkness said to Gwen as they stepped out of the Torchwood SUV.
‘Yeah. Awful, isn’t it?’ she answered. ‘Even when it’s gone eight o’clock in the rest of Wales, it’ll still be 1955 in Splott.’
Jack looked at her sideways. ‘No, I mean they live here.’ He gestured around the alley, at the concrete walls of the flats that stretched nine storeys above them on both sides. ‘They don’t just exist. They breathe. They love. Play, decide, plan, laugh, screw. It has the smell of life.’
‘It has the smell of something else, if you ask me. Vomit and piss.’
‘And just a dash of dog shit,’ conceded Jack. ‘Labrador, I’d say.’
‘Now you’re just showing off.’
‘Well, watch your step. And you wanna take a look at him while I check out the victim?’ Jack pointed to a hunched figure opposite, and then strode off down the alleyway into the crime scene, his long military coat flapping around him.
Police Constable Jimmy Mitchell had his head in his hands when Gwen went over to him. She didn’t recognise him immediately. She only saw the burly policeman sitting on the kerb, where he clutched one leg of the nearby road sign as though he was frightened to let go. The uniform, the fluorescent jacket, should have given him an air of authority. Instead, he was like a lost child. His posture looked defeated and his peaked cap was discarded on the pavement beside him. There was a fresh pool of vomit near his feet. He looked up, and she almost didn’t know him then either, because his face was grey with shock. She’d worked for a while with Mitchell on late patrols, weeks ago, the usual boring driving tour of night-time Cardiff, enlivened only by the chance to break up a bottle fight in a dingy pub at closing time.
‘Mitch?’ Gwen asked him. ‘Oh God, what’s happened to you?’
Mitch opened his mouth, but for a moment couldn’t speak. There were flecks of vomit in his moustache. He gestured wordlessly back down the alley. Should she leave him to take a look, or stay with him to make sure he wasn’t injured or badly in shock? An angry shout from Jack decided the matter, and she hurried down the alley to join him.
Jack stood by the corpse, his hands on his hips. He tilted his head up towards the blue afternoon sky and screwed up his eyes, whether from the bright sun or from sheer exasperation it wasn’t clear to Gwen. ‘What do you see?’
She studied the body. It lay supine, half on the pavement and half in the gutter. Legs folded over to one side, arms splayed out at shoulder height. The back of the head had leaked blood and brains into the roadway, and wetted the otherwise dried mud that caked the nearby drain. ‘Looks like the same cause of death as the others’ she said.
‘Look again.’
Gwen took a broader view of the alley. ‘This is a new location. Still out of the way. Secluded. But further into town.’
He dropped his gaze and his pale blue eyes stared directly at her. ‘Look again.’
‘Time of death must be early this morning.’
He clucked his tongue. ‘Let’s leave that for Owen to decide at the autopsy. Now, look again.’
Gwen stooped for a closer examination. The corpse’s lower face and chest were spattered with fresh vomit. Gwen coughed and gagged abruptly. ‘This is too recent. It wasn’t him.’
‘It wasn’t him, right,’ agreed Jack. He raised his voice to a shout. ‘It was someone else who barfed over the evidence!’ Gwen could see Mitch further up the alleyway, still staring silently at his own feet. ‘It was someone,’ Jack continued, ‘who had two corned beef sandwiches and a Tango Orange before he came on duty.’
Gwen arched her eyebrows at him. ‘I don’t believe you can work that out from just looking at that pile of sick.’
‘It’s the smell,’ he told her.
‘Dog shit, vomit… Now I feel sick.’ She hunkered down to examine the corpse again, unsure whether to breathe through her nose or her mouth in the process. The face seemed familiar. And why did she associate that face with the smell of fish and raw meat? Not from the stench of Mitch’s acid vomit, that was certain. She could see that the victim had been a tattyhaired vagrant who looked much more than his teenage years. ‘The previous victims were older than this guy.’
Gwen remembered where she’d seen this kid before. He’d been selling magazines by the covered market. He was one of the badged vendors who cheerfully cajoled shoppers to part with their money, and who didn’t scowl even when the passers-by gave him the finger instead of cash. And now here he lay, dead in a grubby back alley in Splott. Someone or something had extinguished that lively look in his eyes by crushing the back of his skull. Crushing it so completely, Gwen already knew, that when they turned him over they would be able to see the cracked remains of his top vertebrae.
‘Youngster.’ Jack nodded, satisfied. ‘Won’t be so hard for Tosh to cover up,’ cause he won’t be missed.’
‘He will be missed.’ Gwen was surprised how angry she felt about it. ‘He’ll be missed by me. I’ve seen him selling the Big Issue in town.’
‘So, what’s his name?’
‘I don’t know what his—’ She bit off the rest of her sentence. ‘That’s not what I meant, and you know it.’
Jack smiled at her. Now she’d been working with him for a while, Gwen knew that he was trying to encourage her, not mock her. That still didn’t stop her feeling like he was patronising her. ‘It’s all relative,’ Jack said. ‘Which of us will be missed? And when? Next year? Ten years? A century? When they’re building the next Millennium Stadium, in Cardiff or whatever Cardiff has become by then, who will miss any of us?’
Gwen stood up again. ‘Don’t give me that “the universe is an atom in a giant’s fingernail” bollocks. If you exaggerate the context, of course nothing’s significant. What we do is important. What Mitch does is important.’ She saw Jack puzzling over this. ‘Him, that poor policeman down there, staring at his own spew, he’s significant.’ As if to prove it, she began walking back to Mitch’s beaten figure.
‘Name any famous cop from two hundred years ago,’ Jack called after her.
‘Robert Peel,’ she snapped back without having to think.
‘Wrong. He was the Home Secretary. Go on, name anyone from his police force.’
She faltered in her step, reconsidered, and kept walking.
‘Joseph Grantham,’ Jack told her. ‘Who remembers him? He was the first officer killed on duty. People have moved on, many times over. They don’t care. They’re all living their own lives. Existing, breathing, screwing, remember? But see, that’s why I like you, Gwen Cooper. You do care. It’s at the heart of you. It motivates you. And it makes people see they can be better themselves.’
‘Sometimes I don’t think you care about anyone,’ she muttered. She was standing by Mitch again, helped him to his feet. She mimed ‘moustache’ to him by waggling her finger under her own nose, and offered him a tissue to wipe away the vomit.
‘C’mon, Gwen.’ Jack was calling her back.
‘Have you radioed in?’ she asked Mitch. He nodded mutely. ‘OK, I’ve got to go now. Sorry.’
Jack was angling his mobile phone at the dead youngster. He had the mobile on speaker, so that he could talk to Toshiko at the same time as transmitting a crime-scene image back to her at the Torchwood Hub.
‘… second one within a one-kilometre radius of his apartment. Starting to look like we’ve got our man, Tosh. So, where is he?’
‘Working on it, Jack,’ Toshiko’s voice told him from the radio.
‘Are these pictures any good? I mean for analysis, I wasn’t gonna get them printed up and framed for my desk back at the office. People hated that last time.’
‘They’re ideal,’ enthused Toshiko. ‘I can cross-reference the upload with structured information in pictures and captions from the Police National Database. Smart stuff they’ve got – a multimedia setup that integrates the text, image, video and audio data at the level of the bit-stream so that they can be stored, accessed and processed by the same system.’
Jack rolled his eyes. ‘I was interested right up to the point where you said “upload”.’
Gwen tutted. ‘All the SOCOs I know would love that kind of system. Something that could identify patterns that link directly to individuals. Like persistent offenders whose patterns of offence haven’t been obvious to investigators.’
Jack grinned at her. ‘Oh, you and Tosh were just made for each other.’
A breeze was starting to lift litter down the narrow alley, and swirl it around their feet and onto the corpse. Sweet wrappers stuck in the blood and vomit.
Gwen studied the sky. Dark grey clouds were obscuring most of the blue now. ‘Weather’s deteriorating.’
‘Yeah,’ said Toshiko’s voice. ‘There’s a strange cold front over the city. Not what we’d expected from the forecast. Plenty of rain on its way, and the temperature’s unusual for this time of year. Low 60s. Like Owen’s IQ.’
Jack pulled his collar up as the breeze stiffened. ‘OK, Tosh, your smart system has had plenty of time now. So where’s our killer?’
‘Already left his office. Office mates said they thought he was going into the city centre, not back home. Then we lost his trail behind a lorry on the M4, and missed his exit junction.’
‘Options?’
‘I’m trying to get to his secretary,’ said Toshiko. ‘And we’re still scanning for his car.’
Jack considered the corpse at his feet. ‘All right, Gwen and I are going into the centre. Tosh and Owen, we need clean-up here for the corpse. Location…’
‘Got it from your GPS signal,’ Toshiko said. ‘Post code CF24 9XZ. You’re in Gwion Lane, Splott.’
Jack broke the connection, and started back towards the SUV. Mitch had got to his feet now, and stood to an awkward kind of attention as Jack and Gwen approached. This meant he stood between them and the Torchwood car.
‘I radioed for back-up, and they’re on the way. Until then, anything I can do to help, sir?’
‘Radio them again and cancel,’ Jack told him, ‘Torchwood will handle this now.’ Gwen saw Mitch’s face flush with embarrassment. ‘Go ahead,’ Jack urged him. Mitch fumbled for his radio and did what he was told.
‘You know,’ Jack said to Gwen, ‘I was kind of worried that we’d never find a big-boned policeman to vomit copiously on our victim and then cower on the pavement. But I was wrong. Here was Constable Mitchell, ready to fill that vacancy.’
Gwen prodded Jack in his side with an angry finger.
‘All right,’ grumbled Jack. ‘Constable, keep any arriving bystanders away from the body until the Torchwood clean-up team arrive. And here…’ From one of the flapped pockets in his greatcoat he pulled an evidence bag, transparent plastic with a coloured seal. He thrust it at the baffled policeman.
‘Try not to throw up on anyone else.’
All Gwen could do was smile an apology to Mitch as she climbed into the SUV. Jack swiftly dropped the car into reverse and the SUV’s tyres squealed their way back up through the trash-strewn alley. In the reflection of the side-mirror, Gwen watched Jimmy Mitchell sink slowly back to the pavement, still clutching the plastic bag.