‘Could it have been disturbed?’
‘It’s possible. But somehow I doubt it.’ Owen let out a huge yawn he made no effect to conceal. ‘I’ve put him in the Morgue anyway.’
‘I thought you were going to get your head down? You look like you could do with some kip.’
Owen pursed his lips. He didn’t bother arguing. He was certainly tired, but he was still too wound up after the action in the warehouse. There was no way he was going to get to sleep now, and he didn’t feel like going home. Besides which, time on the firing range was always fun, and he knew perfectly well that Captain Jack Harkness could put six bullets through the same diamond on a playing card at this range. Even using that old relic of a handgun. Owen didn’t know why Jack was so attached to it; the weapons Torchwood had available were literally incredible; a lot of them were state-of-the-art firearms and many were augmented with alien technology. They had automatics that couldn’t miss, laser-guided rounds, explosive rounds, depleted uranium rounds, stun-guns, handguns that carried super-dense flechettes in a slim magazine containing nearly 200 shots. And yet Jack always stuck with his old Webley revolver, its grip worn smooth with years of usage and the flat-sided barrel nicked with a lifetime of action. He kept it in a large, old-fashioned leather holster at his hip.
Another six shots thundered down the range and punched flakes of paper into the damp air. Each round had struck the first three Weevil cut-outs in the eye.
Jack stood in a slowly moving cloud of gun smoke, arm extended, face stony.
‘Coffee, gentlemen,’ said Ianto as he came in. He put down the tray on one of the reloading tables and brushed a smudge of cordite from his shirt cuff. He looked up, saw Jack’s grim expression, then checked the Weevils. ‘Feeling a bit out of sorts, are we?’
‘I didn’t like the way they were looking at me.’
Owen smiled at Ianto and jabbed a finger at Jack. ‘He’s frustrated, he is.’
‘I know. He always aims high when he’s in a bad mood.’
‘You could both do with some practice yourselves,’ said Jack. ‘I want you all on this firing range at least once a day from now on.’
‘What’s the big hurry?’ Owen asked.
‘I don’t know – yet.’
‘It’s the Rift, isn’t it?’ said Ianto. ‘All these fluctuations and sparks. Something’s coming and we don’t know what it is.’
‘You gotta be ready,’ said Jack simply. He was wearing a fresh, pale blue shirt over his white tee. There was, predictably, no sign of any wound now. ‘Tell me about Gwen and Tosh. What’s new?’
‘They’re checking out a new lead,’ replied Ianto. ‘Not far from Newport, somewhere called Greendown Moss.’
‘New lead?’ prompted Owen.
‘Professor Len is with them,’ Ianto said.
‘Professor Len?’ Owen looked confused. ‘Sorry, have I missed something?’
‘An old acquaintance,’ Jack explained. ‘Historian and ghost hunter. Thought he could be useful.’
‘Well three cheers for Professor Len,’ said Owen. He turned and whispered to Ianto, ‘Never heard of him.’
‘Let’s hope they have more luck than we did, anyway.’ Jack reloaded his gun, slipped it back in its holster and closed the flap down over the butt. He picked up his coffee, sipped it, then talked as he walked, heading for the exit. ‘Course, they have a slightly trickier job: they don’t know exactly what they’re looking for either, but at least they don’t know where to look. What’s our excuse?’
Owen cleared his throat. ‘Poor light. Couldn’t see a thing in that bloody warehouse. I almost shot you.’
‘We had it cornered, Owen.’ Jack made his way through the Hub to his own office and sat down, swinging his boots up onto the desk.
‘Whatever it was,’ said Ianto.
‘There was no way out,’ Jack continued. ‘The damn thing just disappeared.’
‘Teleport?’ wondered Owen.
‘Anything’s possible. But it didn’t feel like that – and besides there’s usually an energy residue, a tang in the air you can taste when a matter transmitter’s in use.’ Jack’s blue eyes narrowed as he thought. ‘I want it found, guys. I don’t like the idea of an unidentified extraterrestrial loose in Cardiff. There are too many identified ones here already. And if anything’s coming in through the Rift we don’t know about, I want to know why.’
Owen stood at the hand rail, overlooking the Rift, which ran through Cardiff like an invisible dagger. It was symbolised by the huge water sculpture which stood outside the Millennium Centre and ran directly underground to the base of the Torchwood Hub. Down here the monolith had lost a lot of its shine to corrosion and algae, and parts of the complex machinery inside were open to view, but it was still impressive.
If the Rift was a blade, then the wound it had made bled problems – flotsam and jetsam and alien life forms from across time and space, all washed up on the South Wales coast. It was Torchwood’s job to find them, track them down, neutralise any potential threat and, if possible, use what they found to arm the human race against the future. The only trouble being that the future was already here: this was the twenty-first century, when ‘everything changes’, as Jack liked to put it.
So it was a race against time, a hectic roller-coaster of a life that Owen loved. They all did.
Ianto appeared by the basin at the foot of the sculpture and waved up at Owen. ‘I’ve checked for Rift activity,’ he said. ‘Tosh is the expert, but from what I can see we’re having another blip.’
‘Blip? Is that a technical expression?’
‘Yes. As opposed to a spark.’
‘Now you’re just kidding me, right?’
‘Activity surge,’ Ianto explained patiently.
Owen jogged down the steps to join him on the way to Toshiko’s workstation. ‘It’s been getting busier for weeks now,’ Owen muttered. ‘There could be any number of things coming through that we don’t know about.’
‘Tosh said that there was evidence of range fluctuation as well,’ Ianto said. ‘Meaning that the area affected by the Rift is widening.’
‘We need her back here to look at these readings,’ Owen said, casting a look over the six heads-up monitors suspended over Toshiko’s desk. They were all showing continuous readouts of one kind or another. Ianto had been right: Toshiko was the expert. She could have told at a glance what was going on here. ‘When’s Tosh due back?’
‘I assume that will depend on what they find at Greendown Moss.’
‘That’s out Newport way, isn’t it?’
‘That’s where Tosh said the original Rift spike earthed, yes.’ As they watched the monitors, bright green zigzags flickered across a number of display graphics. ‘Another surge.’
‘Give me a nice dead body any day,’ Owen muttered. ‘I can tell you everything then. Even if it’s alien I can tell you something. But this …’ he waved a hand at the glimmering screens. ‘Just bollocks.’
‘Is that a technical expression?’
Owen scowled. ‘Get onto Tosh and Gwen, tell them to get their arses back here and do some proper work.’
‘I have done some preliminary research myself,’ Ianto said. ‘Tried to pick up on some basic patterns in the Rift energy and cross-reference them to police reports on the paranormal.’
‘Police reports? Do they have time to make reports on the paranormal?’
‘You’d be surprised.’
‘I thought they were too busy polishing their whistles and telling people the time.’
Ianto smiled. ‘There are probably too many paranormal incidents to make a report on everything. They only report major strangeness, not minor strangeness. So they do keep records – the police are very good at that. I hacked into their database and ran a few sifting programmes to see if any minor strangenesses came up.’
‘So what have you found, Sherlock?’
Ianto pushed a slim manila envelope across the desk. ‘The Strange Case of Saskia Harden.’<
br />
SIX
Owen drove his Honda 2000S to Trynsel. The sat-nav prompted him quietly from the dashboard, and he was connected to the Hub hands-free via his ear comm.
‘I was hoping for a day off,’ he muttered ruefully as the first spots of rain appeared on the windscreen. The two-hour nap he’d taken on the sofa by his workstation already seemed like a distant memory – or a brief, unsatisfying taste of what real sleep was like.
‘There are no days off at Torchwood,’ said Jack cheerfully. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Ianto’s got me chasing some pretty young blonde—’
‘He knows you so well.’
‘—with a suicide habit.’
‘Like I said. Hold it – suicide habit?’
‘She keeps throwing herself in the canal,’ Owen said.
‘She sure sounds fun.’
Ianto’s voice came through: ‘Saskia Harden. Serial attempts to take her own life, according to the police reports.’
‘And Torchwood is interested in her because …?’
‘Filed under paranormal,’ Ianto explained. ‘She’s been found face down in garden ponds, canals, even a lake, on no fewer than seven separate occasions in the last five months.’
‘That’s weird, but it’s not paranormal.’
‘Except that she was found dead on each occasion,’ Owen added. ‘You’ve got to admit, that’s one step further than weird.’
‘OK,’ Jack’s voice said, but there was still reservation. ‘And I take it that the police didn’t see this one-step-further-than-weirdness as an emergency.’
‘That’s correct,’ said Ianto.
‘So – why’s Owen on his way to find her?’ Jack’s voice took on a warning tone. ‘We’re busy, Ianto. I’ve got Gwen and Tosh looking for ghosts in the middle of nowhere and a Weevil-killer on the loose. Then there’s the young mother in Splott who’s got a spider the size of a dinner plate in her bath and we’re due another writ from the Hokrala Corporation any day now. We’ve got lots to do.’
‘This Saskia girl could be a lead,’ Owen said quietly.
‘A lead?’
‘Ianto cross-checked his non-emergency paranormal police reports with missing persons and, er, water.’ Owen swallowed, realising how lame this was going to sound.
‘I thought it might provide some kind of lead on your missing alien,’ Ianto added. ‘It went missing in the fish farm, after all. That’s a water connection.’
‘Kinda tenuous,’ Jack said.
‘Except that I back-tracked Tosh’s Rift scan and found that the same kind of temporal spark that we registered at the fish farm also occurred at each of the locations where Saskia Harden was found dead in the water.’
‘You’ve got to admit it’s probably more than coincidence,’ Owen added. ‘Anyway, I think she’s worth checking out.’
Jack laughed knowingly. ‘Yeah, after all, she’s young, blonde, needs a shoulder to cry on …’
‘It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.’
‘So where does she live, this mysterious and beautiful serial suicide?’
‘We don’t know,’ Ianto admitted.
‘What is she? A vagrant?’
‘The address she gave the police doesn’t exist,’ Ianto replied. ‘They don’t actually know that – they’ll have picked her up and transferred her to hospital and left it at that. But she doesn’t feature on any government database – no birth certificate, education, national insurance, employment, taxation, or criminal record. Nothing at all. To all intents and purposes she doesn’t exist. That alone is enough to warrant some investigation, but no one else has the time or, it would seem, the inclination. No one, that is, except yours truly.’
‘OK,’ Jack said, and there was a hint of interest in his voice now. ‘So how you gonna find her?’
‘Well, that’s where I had to be extremely clever as well as amazingly handsome,’ Ianto said. ‘Because there was one, teeny-weeny little computer record which did feature Saskia Harden’s name: the appointments list at the Trynsel Medical Centre.’
The Trynsel Medical Centre was a newly built NHS facility on the outskirts of Cardiff. It was a single-storey, yellow-brick building with sliding glass doors and a receptionist who only looked up at Owen after he had stood in front of the reception desk for a full forty-five seconds. He’d counted them. In that time, Owen had checked out the open-plan waiting room, with its usual array of notices advertising flu jabs, health clinics, post-natal care and sponsored fun runs. There was a large poster devoted to stopping people smoking, and another one about mental health care. Beyond these cheery signs was the waiting room proper, seemingly full of people with bad coughs. There were mothers and children, old men, one or two younger guys, but all of them were coughing and they all had grey faces and dark circles under their eyes. One old guy was making a big show of bringing up something thick and gooey from the back of his throat into his handkerchief.
‘Can I help you?’ asked the receptionist eventually, raising her voice over the noise.
‘Yeah,’ said Owen, turning casually back to look at her. ‘I’d like to see Dr Strong, please.’
‘You mean you’d like to make an appointment,’ she stated primly.
‘No, I just want to see him. It’s not a medical matter.’ Owen gave her a brief, tight smile. ‘Well, it is a sort of medical matter I suppose. We were at uni together. He’s an old mate, and I thought I’d look him up.’
The receptionist’s face hardened minutely into a well-rehearsed mask of indifference. ‘I’m afraid Dr Strong isn’t available today.’
A large man had appeared behind the receptionist, middle-aged with a twinkle in his eye. He glanced up from the file he was reading at the mention of Strong’s name.
‘Someone looking for Bob?’
‘Yeah – me,’ said Owen quickly, before the receptionist could respond. He grinned and extended his hand towards the other man, introducing himself. ‘Dr Owen Harper. Hi. I was told Bob would be here.’
‘Well he would be, normally,’ replied the other man. He had an ID card hanging from his shirt pocket which read Dr Iuean Davis – Practice Manager. ‘In fact he was in this morning, but he’s had to go home ill.’
‘Typical,’ said Owen. ‘Something serious, I hope …?’
Davis smiled. ‘Flu, I reckon. Only started this morning – nasty cough. Like most of this lot, actually.’ He nodded at the waiting room full of people hacking and spluttering into hankies.
‘Yeah,’ mused Owen, curious despite himself. ‘What’s up with them?’
‘Search me. It’s either flu or biological warfare, I can’t decide which,’ Davis chuckled. ‘Or maybe it’s just something in the water. Anyway, I doubt Bob’ll be back soon.’
‘OK,’ said Owen. ‘No problem. I’ll try him at home.’
He walked out, with the sound of the receptionist coughing behind him.
Owen climbed back into his car and contacted the Hub. ‘Ianto, I need Strong’s home address.’
‘Problem?’
‘He’s not at the surgery today – he’s off sick.’
‘I always wondered why GPs don’t take more sick leave. After all, they spend every day meeting sick people. They must catch everything going at some point.’
‘Well there are plenty of them here. I’ve never seen such a pasty-faced bunch. What’s wrong with this area? TB epidemic?’
‘I’ll check if you like.’
‘Just give me his address. It can’t be far.’
Ianto tapped up Strong’s address and read it out to Owen.
‘I’m on my way now. This had better be worth it.’ Owen started the Honda and pulled out of the medical centre car park, nearly hitting another woman on her way in, busy coughing into a tissue.
Owen leant out the window. ‘You want to look where you’re going, love!’
‘Sorry,’ she wheezed, holding up a hand to show that she knew it had been her fault. She coughed again, a real hack, and looked
down into her tissue. ‘It’s not the cough that carries you off – it’s the coffin they carry you off in,’ she said with a weak smile.
Owen nodded and drove off. He’d seen the red phlegm in the tissue. Professionally it troubled him, though the woman had been on her way to see her GP, which was the right thing to do. But the matter preyed on his mind all the way to Robert Strong’s house.
It was a pleasant semi-detached with a long driveway and a Ford Mondeo. Owen rang the doorbell and waited for an answer.
Eventually a man came to the door; Owen could hear him coughing on the other side. The door opened and a long, pale face looked out. ‘Yes?’
‘Dr Strong?’
‘Yeah. Who wants to know?’
‘My name’s Owen Harper.’
Strong was suddenly overtaken by a massive coughing fit, clutching the door to support himself as he doubled up.
‘Here, that doesn’t sound so good, mate,’ Owen said, automatically moving to help.
‘It’s been getting worse all morning,’ Strong told him between coughs. He sounded full of phlegm. After a few moments, he recovered and smiled wanly. ‘I had to come home from work today – never done that before in my life!’
‘I’m a doctor,’ Owen said. ‘Maybe I can help.’
Strong gave a short laugh. ‘I’m a doctor too,’ he said. ‘Fat lot of good it’s done me. Come in.’
It was a bachelor’s house, with black leather armchairs and a widescreen plasma TV, surrounded by untidy stacks of DVDs on the laminate flooring and a good-looking sound system. In the corner was a Wii console with a few games scattered around it. There was evidence of a previous life, however: a photo on the mantelpiece – Strong and a woman embracing, faces pressed together, grinning at the camera. Strong noticed Owen looking at it and said, ‘Ex-wife. Quite liked her, then.’
‘Creative differences?’
‘You could say that.’ Strong dissolved into more coughing and motioned towards a chair. ‘Take a seat,’ he croaked.
Something in the Water Page 5