Torchwood_Long Time Dead

by Sarah Pinborough

  Cutler stared at him until he realised that the Commander really wasn’t joking. His fingers tightened around the cigarette packet.

  ‘I’ll have to call my superior officer,’ he said through gritted teeth.

  Jackson was already heading out of the Portakabin. ‘Of course. He’ll confirm what I’ve just said. We’ll need you on board, of course. Even if it’s just as a figurehead. Can’t have the Department seen to be running the case. That would raise too many questions.’

  As Cutler followed him out, his blood boiling, he had a few bloody questions of his own.

  Chapter Eleven

  Andy Davidson had spent at least forty-five minutes looking for DI Cutler before someone had mentioned trying in the gym. Even though his mind was on other things, it annoyed him that he hadn’t thought of it. But then he never used the place and had forgotten it was there. Cutler, on the other hand, was a keen runner and often disappeared into the station’s basement to use the weights room and the treadmill if the Welsh weather was too vile to hit the roads. The gym was a relatively new addition – a stress-relieving initiative by the top brass, apparently. Andy thought it had more to do with the brass wanting them all to get in better physical shape, and thus far he’d successfully avoided it himself. He had a naturally slim frame and despite his lack of regular exercise could still chase down a thief or a mugger when he needed to. He was buggered if he was going to spend his free time practising.

  The building grew quieter as he took the stairs down. It had been a busy day and most people were still at their desks working upstairs. It was only Cutler who had vanished, and Andy guessed that his boss wanted the gym to himself for an hour so he could vent his frustrations privately. He didn’t blame him either. He’d never seen the DI so angry as when he’d shown up at one of the crime scenes – the toilet at the back of a late-night café – and told them all quietly to get the scenes processed as quickly as possible and to get the bodies to the mortuary. It was a contained rage.

  Thinking about it, it seemed to Andy that Cutler was screwed either way. With the Department making him the front man for the case, he had to take the rap if the murders weren’t solved, and still do all the talking to the press, but he was unlikely to be given any proper answers even if the Department did find out who was responsible. He shivered slightly as he pushed open the door to the changing rooms. Who were the Department, anyway? They weren’t entirely military, but at the same time they weren’t MI5 or MI6 style spies. They gave him the creeps almost as much as those bodies with the bleeding eyes did. He didn’t like the thought that the two were linked. Not at all. There was nothing comforting about it. It was a bit like the old days coming back to haunt him.

  Both the Department and the state of the bodies reminded him too much of Torchwood business, and that made his heart race with more than fear. Most of the time he could separate his day job from everything he knew about Torchwood and the awful events that had left Ianto dead and poor Gwen in hiding, but there were these strange murders and now these new developments he needed to tell Cutler about. Cardiff was going spooky again. He thought of the number stored in his brain – the only place he felt safe keeping it – and wondered if maybe he should call it and ask Gwen for help. Or at least find out if she’d heard of anything like this before. Especially as the contamination suit that had been found could only have come from the Hub site. But he couldn’t call her. She had enough problems of her own. Plus, he still had moments of quite well-founded paranoia that first his unexpected promotion and now his sudden secondment to CID hadn’t entirely been as a result of his own hard work but more as some kind of pay-off from above after everything that had happened with the children. The cool air didn’t help his inner chill, and neither did the memory of those eyeless corpses.

  Still, it wasn’t as if either he or Cutler were going to have too much time to think about them for a while. That was now Department business, and as of an hour ago it looked like they had a whole heap of other trouble to investigate. Andy Davidson just wished everything hadn’t abruptly gone quite so weird.

  DI Cutler was standing in front of a locker, a towel wrapped around his waist.

  ‘Sir?’ Andy said. Cutler didn’t look up. Steam billowed from a shower cubicle behind him as if he’d got out and forgotten to turn it off. Maybe he’d just needed to get his shampoo or something. Andy frowned. That was a lot of steam.

  ‘Sir?’ he said again. What the hell was his boss doing? Most of the lockers were empty and had their metal doors open. Cutler was moving slowly along the line and closing them. When he finished the first row, he bent forward and continued along the bottom.

  ‘What are you doing, sir?’ Andy went into the shower stall and fought his way through the steam to turn it off, the mist making his shirt cling to his back as the damp soaked it through.

  Cutler had moved to the top row. ‘It needs to be closed,’ he muttered. ‘It needs to be closed. Before it’s too late.’

  ‘What does?’

  Finally, now that his sergeant was standing right behind him, Tom Cutler turned to face him. His eyes widened, surprised.

  ‘Where the hell did you come from?’

  ‘Um…’ Andy shuffled slightly from foot to foot. ‘I’ve been here a couple of minutes. What were you doing? What needs to be closed?’ He around him. ‘Apart from all the locker doors, apparently.’

  Cutler frowned. ‘What are you on about?’ He picked up his trousers from the bench. ‘Anyway, what are you doing down here? Do the Department need me to perform some tricks for them? Roll over and beg? Oh, no,’ he sneered slightly as he pulled his clothes on, ‘the DCI has already done that.’

  ‘It’s not to do with that.’ Andy put Cutler’s strange behaviour to one side. The DI seemed fine now. He must have just been mulling something over and got lost in his thoughts. He needed to stop seeing strangeness everywhere. The Torchwood days were done. ‘Although Fellowes said the helmet turned up in one of the bins near the site. It’s gone to the lab.’

  ‘Good. What else?’

  ‘Something odd’s been reported. Two suicides. Quite nasty – one stabbed herself in the kitchen this morning while getting the family’s breakfast and another hung himself over the side of his balcony after getting home from his night shift at work.’

  ‘So?’ Cutler said. ‘Suicide’s not our business.’

  ‘I know but both of these left the same message. It just said, “I remember”.’

  ‘“I remember”?’ The DI did up his shirt.

  ‘Yeah. Weird, huh?’

  ‘Well, we may as well take a look before the Department get on my back to deliver their press release for them like the dancing monkey I am.’ He grabbed his jacket. ‘Just what the hell has got into this city anyway? Multiple murders and suicides all within a matter of days?’ They stepped out into the blissfully steam-free stairwell. ‘And I’m still not happy about that suit that was found. I know the murders are Department business now, but I want to keep an eye on just how much they’re involved, if you know what I mean.’

  Andy Davidson followed him up the stairs and back to the general hubbub of the station. ‘You think the Department are involved?’

  ‘Who knows? But they know something. Whatever’s going on here, it’s got something to do with that site. I can feel it in my bones, Andy. Let’s play their game and keep them close. I want as much access as we can get to the case.’

  ‘And the suicides?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Cutler sounded bored. ‘We’ll take a look at those too. They’ll be a good smoke screen while we keep an eye on Commander Jackson and his boys and girls.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Andy Davidson grinned. It was good to be busy, and working with DI Cutler could never be considered dull.

  Chapter Twelve

  It was a place between places. It sat between time and space and galaxies, unnoticed. A dimension of its own. Sometimes, those more corporeal, the stars, the planets and space had a sense of it. They thought they gli
mpsed it in the folds of time and perhaps they did. Where sentient life existed in the universe it became a thing unspoken; a shiver, a dark shadow, a touch of a sixth sense.

  As the worlds grew older and civilisations came and went, each one had a name for it. All life could sense its existence, even if they had never seen proof. They could feel it in the darkness of night and the nightmares that came from time to time. They wondered if perhaps it could come for them in the long sleep after death. They knew it was waiting and they knew it wasn’t empty in all the ways that they knew it existed despite no proof. Survival instinct, gut, superstition – all told of the extra dimension. The one that didn’t belong, that was filled with everything you feared, everything thing that caused you pain. They all had a name for it.

  Time had no place for it. Life and death did not exist. There were no planets and stars and moons and spaces between them. It was empty darkness, and yet it was not empty. It waited. It was hungry. As the other dimensions were aware of it, so it and its inhabitants were aware of them.

  For most of eternity, the barriers held, despite the talk of monsters and demons and madness amongst those who had given the place so many names as the years flew by. Civilisations came and went. Stars burned bright and died. Time passed. Eventually, a young explorer sat out on the dark edges of space, so far from his home world, out near the new star of the nine planets. For a long time he just stared into what looked like a tiny rift in space.

  He considered himself a clinical thinker and had no time for superstitions. The tiny cut in space over the third planet, so small his equipment had nearly missed it completely, had begun to fascinate him. Not for itself – but for where it could lead. He would show those at home that there was nothing to fear from that place of darkness and nightmares – if it even existed.

  He studied the rift for a long time. The tiny planet below circled its sun several times as he sent in probes and measuring devices and studied the data they sent back. Finally he found it. He was sure. A measure of space completely other to anything he’d encountered before. A blip in the readings. Somewhere inside the rift was a doorway or a tear of some kind to a place whose physics were entirely different to their own. His heart raced. This was it. This was the moment and the place that he would come into his glory.

  He worked carefully. How long such an unnatural opening would remain he couldn’t determine. The forces of nature would be aligning to knit it back together. Such an unnatural thing could not be allowed to continue. Physics would be unbalanced should one leak into the other and physics was the one law above all others, no matter how the spiritualists argued otherwise.

  When he was ready, he launched the remote viewer, as small an item as he could make it, slim and rectangular, into the rift, attached to a tiny drone. From within the safety of his own ship, he navigated it towards the cut in space and time. The rift itself, tiny as it was, was fascinating. There were things in it; items of debris from various cultures and civilisations, some of which he recognised and some he didn’t. It was bigger on the inside than the tiny entrance suggested. One unnatural thing housing a gateway to another unnatural thing. He found that the idea made him shiver slightly and that caused him irritation. It was superstition to be afraid with no reason; and he was no spiritualist.

  The remote viewer slipped from one dimension to the next and he turned on the monitor, his vast palms slick with nervous anticipation. For a long while, nothing happened. He slept. He checked his instruments. He tried not to feel disappointed, for that too was not the clinical way. He would simply have to try again.

  He was sleeping when the screen came alive. It went from the blackness of simply being off, to a terrible darkness of something other. His mouth dropped open and his weighty arms flopped away from the control panels and to the sides of his command chair. He felt its hunger, the excitement of all the strangeness that lived – no, not lived – existed within, as it reached out back through the viewer and sought him out. He had what it needed. He couldn’t tear his eyes away and cold sank in through his skin as the dimension tore into his mind for his fears and terrors and the things that woke him in the night when he was a child.

  He wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to turn his ship around and go home and shout to the world that the spiritualists were right and there were things worse than the endless sleep that faced them all. There was a blacker darkness than nothing and they should pray to nature and physics and each other that it would never find them.

  He did none of those things. Instead, his eyes exploded as the dimension took him, and his body died, sitting in shit, in his commander’s chair. The ship drifted for years, for a while sucked into the orbit around the sun, mimicking the third planet’s movements, the rotting body and rusting ship looking on as life formed there and spread across its surface. As the law of averages would have it – if not the laws of physics pure that the young adventurer had once held so dear – the dead ship finally drifted into the rift and joined the debris there, not long in fact before the search vessel cruised by the small solar system so far from home.

  They didn’t pause for long and didn’t see the tiny rift above the third planet. The young adventurer would not have come this far from home, they concluded, before turning back.

  As the law of averages – which often proves to be the most reliable – would have it, the small viewing device finally slipped out through the tear hidden within the rift. But like its creator it wasn’t unchanged by its experience. The unnatural had connected with it for too long, perhaps because its creator was endlessly tormented in the foul darkness. There was no screen waiting for it to be switched on and SEE. Just the hungry darkness.

  Time passed and the small metal card drifted through the rift, until finally, as the law of averages would have it, the viewing device finally fell from the rift and to the third planet below, falling into the ocean. The third planet had grown and filled with life since the young explorer had paused above their skies. They too had been plagued with glimpses and fears of something beyond. They, like all the other civilisations, gave it a name and, like all the other civilisations, some laughed at it, and others believed it was what waited for so many of them when the quiet nothing of death came.

  And all through the years, beyond the tear in the rift, Hell waited.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Commander Jackson?’

  The soldier had probably spoken his name more than once judging by the uncertain look on his face when Elwood Jackson looked up. He wasn’t surprised. He’d been lost in the information the police had given him regarding the murders, and his head was swimming slightly. That they were committed by the same person who had killed John Blackman was clear, but who was that? All his staff were present and correct. Could one of them have killed Blackman and gone and dumped the suit in a back alley and then got back to the site and into their own, to make it look as if someone had killed him and left? Could anyone have done that without being noticed? He was angry enough that someone had been able to just walk out of the site with a suit on without being stopped or questioned.

  They’d all got slack, that was what had happened. The operation had been going well and with little interest or interference from the rest of Cardiff, or indeed the country, and so those on duty weren’t staying focused. Well, they bloody would do from now on, even if he had to drag them down to the mortuary and show them those awful dead bodies himself. Death itself didn’t bother him, nor would he expect it to bother his soldiers – they were all experienced campaigners who had no doubt each seen horrific sights. But the unnatural quality of these deaths was disturbing. There was nothing earthy and gritty about them, and although they’d been told to expect ‘interesting’ finds on the recovery dig, this was something else. He was both looking forward to and dreading the pathologist’s report on the bodies. He hoped there’d be an explanation for the eyes.

  ‘What is it, Corporal?’ He closed the folder and thankfully placed the dead in his top drawer
. He’d looked at them enough for one day.

  ‘The Department have sent over a new Liaison for you.’ The young man stepped aside. ‘Sue Costa.’

  For a moment, Commander Jackson said nothing. He was too surprised. The woman in the doorway stepped forward and smiled, her teeth perfectly white. Her dark eyes twinkled in her face and he decided in that instant that she was quite beautiful; feline and languid perhaps, but beautiful. Her red shirt dress stopped just above the knee, and he couldn’t help his eyes wandering down her slim body to the matching red heels at her feet. He was old, admittedly, but he wasn’t dead. He could still appreciate a good-looking woman, and after the pictures he’d just been studying, she was a welcome relief.

  ‘You look surprised to see me,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Sorry about that. You know what the Department are like. You should have an email somewhere saying I’m coming.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you. What exactly have the Department sent you for?’ He glanced up at the waiting soldier. ‘You’re dismissed, Corporal.’

  ‘Yes sir. We checked her on the way in, sir. She’s cleared.’

  They waited until the door was closed.

  ‘These murders,’ the woman said, taking a seat opposite his desk and crossing her elegantly long legs. ‘The Department feel that it’s probably best if I act as your liaison with the police while the investigation is under way. Thus far, the activity at this site has caused no problems with the general public, and should anyone suspect that perhaps someone involved with the work here is responsible – well – you can imagine.’

  ‘Quite true.’ Commander Jackson wasn’t quite sure how to react. The request was perfectly reasonable, and yet he couldn’t help but feel that some of his control was being wrested from him.

  ‘You have a high profile in the city and the Department feel that the residents have grown to trust you – your military and war record certainly help that – and therefore they don’t want that reputation damaged. Not while you still have so much more to do here.’