Another Life (20 page)

Almost at once, the starfish released its grip on Gwen’s hand. Jack leapt up, the creature still attached to the letter opener, and he plunged the blade into the wall above the sideboard. The point pierced the plasterboard wall, and when Jack let go of the handle the letter opener had skewered the starfish to the striped wallpaper. The creature spasmed for a moment and then went still.

Gwen ran into the kitchen area of the apartment, and ran water over her wounded hand. The tap slowly ran cold, and the smarting pain seemed to ease a little. Jack joined her at the sink, and stuck his burned fingers under the tap.

‘Thanks,’ Gwen told him. Their hands met briefly in the cold water, so she stroked the back of his hand with a light touch.

Toshiko gave a little groan from where she had been dumped on the horrid shag pile carpet. Jack pulled his hand away, took a towel and went over to check on Toshiko.

Gwen had to dry her hands on a stained tea towel. The back of her right hand was blotched with circles and small scratches, but the skin appeared to be unbroken.

Toshiko was dazed, but not injured. Jack helped her back to her feet. ‘What happened to Applegate?’ she asked him. ‘Did you…? Eww!’ Toshiko had spotted the starfish spiked into the wall, level with her head. It had shrivelled still further, and was dripping yellow-green gunk down the wallpaper and onto the sideboard. ‘God, I thought the decor in this place was dismal, but that’s just disgusting!’

Jack beckoned to Toshiko and Gwen to follow him out of the apartment. Out on the landing, rain was washing in through a fresh hole in the half-landing window. ‘I shot her. Upper arm, I think. Maybe the shoulder. She was running down the stairs, so the momentum carried her on and through that window.’

He trotted down the half-flight of steps. He considered the rain and wind gusting in through the hole before twisting the latch and opening the shattered remains of the window. He took a swift look through the gap, pulled his head back in. He obviously couldn’t believe what he’d seen, because he bravely took another look in the face of the storm.

‘I can’t see the body,’ he said. ‘C’mon, two floors down, who’s gonna survive that?’ He studied Toshiko and Gwen’s reactions. ‘OK, we should check on the way out.’

They returned to the apartment, and went into the bathroom. As soon as the door opened, an overpowering stench of rotting fish assailed them. It was enough to make Gwen’s eyes water.

The remains of the larger starfish had dissolved into a slimy gloop in the bath. Gwen didn’t argue when Jack said he would conduct the search. Hidden behind the side panel of the bath he found a heavy grey box. He pulled it out onto the bathroom rug, and slid it across the room. Gwen switched on her Geiger counter, which ticked quietly. Jack lifted the lid of the box, and the ticking abruptly became a machine-gun rattle of alarm.

Jack snapped the lid shut. ‘OK,’ he said calmly. ‘We appear to have the missing fuel rods.’

They had to make two journeys down the stairwell. On the first they carried the lead-lined box, and pushed it into the boot of the SUV. Second time, they wrapped up the policeman’s corpse in a blanket from Wildman’s apartment, and hefted the body down the stairs. By the time they’d put the other copper’s body in the boot, all three of them were drenched in what felt to Gwen like equal measures of sweat and rainwater.

Jack slammed the boot closed. ‘You two go back to the Hub and get changed. Take the Saab. I’ll deliver the fuel rods to Blaidd Drwg and join you later. Tosh, you can start working on the cover story for these two in the back.’ He checked his watch. ‘Difficult to tell when I’ll get back in this weather.’

‘I hope that’s waterproof,’ Toshiko said.

‘It’s the best,’ Jack told her. ‘American military watch, 1940s. Twenty-four-hour display, a nice piece.’

Toshiko peered at it in the rain. ‘Where did you get it from?’

‘That was a long time ago,’ smiled Jack. He shot his cuffs so that the watch was out of the rain again. ‘That was a whole other life.’

Jack closed the door and steered the SUV upstream and out of the street. Gwen got into the Saab and watched the wake that the SUV left behind. She sat for a while gripping the steering wheel, studying the marks on the back of her hand and thinking about the two young policemen. What creative thinking would Toshiko employ to explain away their absences? Their deaths. She hardly dared ask her, even though she was now sitting next to her.

It was while contemplating these things that Gwen was startled by the sound of her mobile going off. A quick glance at the display revealed that it was Rhys. Was she coming home for dinner tonight? Gwen smiled sheepishly at Toshiko. Not sure, she told her boyfriend. Rain’s really terrible, so she’d need to take it steady. No, she was fine, being over-cautious probably. She’d call him when she knew.

He loved her, he said. She missed him, she replied.

When the call ended, Gwen sat silently for a few more moments in the car. Thinking again about the inventive excuse that Toshiko was going come up with to cover the policemen’s absence. Pondering the excuse she herself was going to offer Rhys tonight when she’d missed dinner again.

Ianto found it surprisingly difficult to close the front door. There was a gale blowing straight across the Bay, and that meant straight at the entrance to the Hub from Mermaid Quay. He put his shoulder to the edge nearest the frame and, after a bit more effort, he was able to get the door to click into place. He shot the bolts securely across the top and bottom, and leaned back against the door, exhausted.

Jack had breezed in, but so had several gallons of water, and the reception floor was awash. ‘We’re gonna need some sandbags out there, Ianto, if this rain keeps up.’

‘Yes, the neighbourhood’s gone to pot,’ said Ianto. ‘Maybe we should move.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack. ‘Imagine how many tea-chests we’d need to pack. That, plus we’d need to get the stationery reprinted.’ He shook himself like a wet dog, and rainwater spattered across the room. His trousers were soaked up to the knee, and he decided it would be a good idea to grasp the material and squeeze water out of the legs right there and then.

Ianto resisted the strong temptation to tut loudly. Instead, he plucked a handful of tissues from a box and mopped the worst of the splashes off the paperwork at the desk. He was able to rescue the flyers for the Redflight Barcud event at the Millennium Centre, but a pile of Tredegar House information leaflets was as good as ruined.

They had disguised the Bayside entrance to the Torchwood Hub as a Tourist Information Centre. And not a particularly salubrious one at that because, obviously, they didn’t want to encourage a steady stream of eager visitors asking for directions to the Pierhead Building or opening times for the Norwegian Church. Not that Ianto couldn’t answer those questions, of course. He prided himself on his arcane local knowledge, whether Cardiff indie bands or the history of Tiger Bay. Mostly, though, they only wanted to know the reason why the word ‘Brains’ was stencilled on a city centre chimney stack. This had all proved useful cover on an awkward occasion when a film crew from a BBC Wales travel programme wouldn’t take no for an answer when looking for an interview.

Ianto helped Jack out of his wet coat. ‘You’ve got a big hole in your sleeve,’ he said.

‘Nothing escapes your eagle eye.’

‘I see you’ve got a new watch, too.’

‘I’m trying it out. Though it’s an old watch. Antique.’

Ianto looked at it admiringly. ‘Very nice. Perhaps you should have one for casual and one for best.’

‘I don’t think so.’ Jack shucked off his sopping wet shoes and kicked them into the corner. ‘A guy with a watch knows what time it is. A guy with two watches is never sure.’ To Ianto’s dismay, he proceeded to peel off his socks and wring them out into the waste bin. ‘Are Tosh and Gwen back?’

‘Waiting for you downstairs,’ said Ianto.

‘You’re not wearing any socks,’ Gwen told him.

‘Nothing escapes your eagle eye,’ replied Jack. ‘Have you admired my watch yet?’

He plonked down into a Boardroom chair, and waited for Toshiko to complete her presentation materials. ‘That flooding is getting critical. We’re gonna have to seal the side entrance. Or put Ianto on a steroid regime, so he can get the door closed.’

Gwen pointed through the Boardroom’s glass wall and into the main Hub area. She could see the water at the foot of the stainless steel tower was rippling. ‘The basin is tidal, isn’t it?’

Jack followed her directions. ‘Yeah. And look how much higher that’s got. Tosh, have we got a valve control on that thing to prevent it flooding the Hub?’

‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘but I can’t promise that the rest of the place is waterproof. There’s a pool of water building up against the exterior window of the Autopsy Room. It would only take one careless accident for that to break.’

‘Owen had better be careful then. He around?’

‘I think Ianto knows where he is,’ said Gwen.

Toshiko tapped the display screen to get their attention again. ‘As for the rest of Cardiff, they’re a lot worse off. Three hundred thousand people are staying at home to avoid getting their feet wet. We’re supposed to have thirty-six inches of rain a year, and we’ve had twenty-four inches in as many hours.’

‘The Oval Basin is starting to fill up with water,’ agreed Gwen. ‘It was like a river raging through there when we walked back from the car. If it carries on like this, by tomorrow morning only the people on the top floors of St David’s Hotel will still be dry. And they probably won’t notice until the caviar runs out.’

Toshiko showed a few more graphics on the display. ‘They did a lot of groundwater modelling studies when they were proposing the barrage for the Bay. I’m going to tap into their instrumentation…’

Gwen laughed. ‘Very good.’ Toshiko didn’t look pleased by this interruption. ‘Sorry, I thought you were joking. You know, water… tap…’

‘Tosh doesn’t joke about her work.’ Jack wagged a finger at Gwen in mock admonishment.

‘They’ve got over two hundred boreholes recording groundwater levels every thirty minutes,’ persisted Toshiko. ‘And they measure other environmental parameters like rainfall, obviously, and atmospheric pressure. Tide and river levels. That lot should give us some idea what’s going on.’

Jack leaned back in his chair, put his bare feet up on the table, and waggled his toes. ‘There are some people round here who still talk about the Bristol Channel floods of 1607.’

‘I imagine there may be some who are old enough to remember it,’ muttered Gwen.

Toshiko was more impressed with the information, however. ‘Thousands died. Houses and villages were swept away. Livestock got destroyed when farmland was inundated. The surrounding region was set back for more than a century. And there’s a recent theory that it was a tsunami. If today’s water levels continue to rise like this, it could do the same kind of damage.’

‘But not as fast,’ observed Gwen.

Toshiko switched off the display screen. ‘A slow tsunami? Well, that would still cause devastation. Wreck the local economy. And kill tens of thousands this time.’ She closed the lid of her laptop. ‘If I’m right.’

Ianto came into the room to offer them coffee. He looked disapprovingly at Jack’s bare feet, so Jack removed them from the table. ‘OK, let’s have your program run overnight Tosh, and see what it tells us tomorrow. Go home now, it’s late. Have a lie-in tomorrow. You too, Gwen. Better take the scenic route, because I think Ianto here has welded the side door shut.’

Gwen knew better than to protest. She heaved herself out of her chair, and made her way to the exit platform with Toshiko.

‘Doesn’t your boyfriend mind you working this late?’ asked Toshiko.

‘He said he was going out to an all-night
Star Wars
marathon,’ lied Gwen.

Toshiko looked unconvinced. ‘In this weather?’

‘They’re
Star Wars
fans,’ explained Gwen. ‘They’d crawl over boiling lava to avoid missing their fifteenth viewing.’

‘Ah,’ said Toshiko, ‘I understand.
Otaku
.’ She smiled when Gwen frowned. ‘Geek.’

‘
Otaku
,’ repeated Gwen.

The platform began to lift them upward.

‘And
gemu otaku
is a video games geek,’ Toshiko said.

‘I think that’s pronounced “Owen Harper”.’ Gwen looked up above them and sighed. ‘You realise that we’ve forgotten the umbrellas again.’

The pavement slab opened up overhead, and the cold rain showered in on them.

Jack watched Ianto polish the table where his feet had been propped. Ianto could tell that his boss didn’t really approve, but he thought that Jack would dislike it even more if the place got to be a mess. At the moment, he had other things to worry about though.

‘Gwen tells me you know where Owen is, Ianto.’

Ianto stopped polishing. ‘No. His radiation readings reached normal, and so he decided to go out. On a date, he said.’

‘A date? What about the work I asked him to do?’

Ianto produced a buff folder of printouts. Balanced on the top of it was the radiation sponge. ‘He asked me to give you these. He said that there’s a lot of information about what a brave and resourceful soldier Sergeant Applegate is, fine service record. And she has 450 Nectar points, in case that’s important.’

‘I could kiss you, Ianto.’

‘No you couldn’t, sir.’

Jack flipped open the folder and stood up. ‘I’m gonna take this down to my office.’ They both walked out of the Boardroom and made their way down the spiral staircase to the main Hub.

Ianto noticed how the water in the centre had risen higher, and seemed to be slapping higher against the edge of the basin. The view through the portholes in the wall above them also seemed to be more turbulent, with fragments of weed whirling past in the dark water and fewer fish visible than usual.

Jack walked away towards his office. ‘You can go home now.’

‘Thank you. I have a bit more filing to do. In the basement. I’d like to finish it.’

Jack laughed. ‘You may as well live here, Ianto,’ he shouted before he closed his office door.