Another Life

by Peter Anghelides

  Jack must have been thinking exactly the same thing. ‘C’mon, Wildman,’ he called across to him. ‘Where are you gonna go from here?’

  Wildman peered behind himself, out across the city. While he did this, Gwen shuffled carefully into the room. She could now see through the skeleton of the building at this height, and a momentary nausea washed over her. She clutched at the wall to steady herself.

  When she looked up, she could see that Wildman was still staring out. The green fabric netting outlined this part of the building beyond the frame of scaffold poles, but through a gap in one section it was possible to see right out over Cardiff. They were high enough now to have a clear view, uninterrupted by nearby buildings. Streets criss-crossed their way towards the waterfront. There was the bronzed hump of the Millennium Centre. The glittering Bay reflected light between the moorings, and stretched out towards the barrage. Clouds were starting to roll in across the Bay, threatening rain from beyond the barrage and out into Môr Hafren.

  Wildman swivelled back around to consider Jack again, careful not to overbalance on the scaffold platform. Gwen could see now that the top of Wildman’s grey jacket was wet and dark. The vivid red splash on his white shirt indicated that this was blood. Wildman’s neck and face didn’t seem to be marked. Maybe he had somehow scraped himself in the chase up through the building. The coat wasn’t his either, it was now apparent. The position of the buttons were for a woman’s raincoat, and that explained why the sleeves were too short. Wildman was breathing more easily now, and smiling broadly. His smile wavered a little when he saw Gwen at the rear of the room, but he soon refocused on Jack.

  Jack had not moved from his precarious position in the centre. He held the pistol in a one-handed grip, unwaveringly pointed at Wildman. Jack’s other hand was at his side, the outside of his wrist against his hip. He knew Gwen was twenty metres behind him, even though she hadn’t spoken, had barely made a sound. He was waggling his fingers slightly, unseen by Wildman, to indicate that Gwen should stay back,

  ‘OK, so you checked out the view,’ Jack called to Wildman. ‘And you know you’re going nowhere.’

  Wildman cocked his head to one side, contemplating Jack. ‘That weapon is a fascinating item,’ he said. His voice betrayed no worry, just amused interest. ‘Is it an antique?’

  ‘It’s a Webley,’ Jack replied calmly. ‘Mark IV. Point three-eight calibre, and a five-inch barrel. More than enough to pick you off where you stand.’

  ‘Interesting. Where do you get the cartridges?’

  Jack’s aim didn’t falter. ‘What matters is where you might be getting one. Any moment now. Step back into the building. Away from the edge. Carefully.’

  ‘I think I’m safer where I am. Why don’t we just continue our chat right here?’

  Jack moved his head to one side, and Gwen could see him smiling grimly. ‘OK. So maybe we start with the obvious stuff. Like, what’s your connection to the deaths of four vagrants. The ones that were found within a few minutes walking distance from the offices of the Blaidd Drwg nuclear research facility?’

  Wildman tutted. ‘Shocking. I saw that on the news. We were all warned about it at the facility, of course. Wouldn’t want the staff to be harmed.’

  ‘No,’ snapped Jack. ‘No you weren’t warned. The murder of the vagrants didn’t make it to the media. We made sure of that. So you’re unusually well informed.’

  ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘And their deaths match the times that you were just about to enter work, or you’d just left. We checked your ID badge accesses at Blaidd Drwg. They all match.’

  Wildman’s smile didn’t change. ‘Do they?’

  ‘You even snuck out one lunchtime. What was that about? Hadn’t taken a packed lunch that day? No, that wouldn’t be it, because your access badge shows that you take lunch in the works canteen every day, 12.15 on the dot. Except for that day. The day the third victim died.’

  ‘It’s no crime to take a walk at lunchtime,’ observed Wildman mildly. ‘You could say it’s my constitutional right.’

  ‘You were killing people, not killing time…’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘… attacking defenceless victims and splitting open their heads.’

  ‘How dreadful,’ said Wildman.

  ‘It’s hard to believe, looking at you now. But you murdered them by biting into the backs of their necks.’

  Wildman laughed in disbelief.

  ‘In fact,’ persisted Jack, ‘isn’t that spinal fluid now? There, down your chin? All over your shirt collar.’

  Wildman raised his hands to his face, an almost involuntary reaction. His face clouded with anger.

  Jack laughed. ‘Made ya look.’

  The breeze through the building had begun to stiffen now. Jack’s greatcoat wafted out behind him, though his stance and his aim remained rock steady. The melancholy wail of a police siren carried up to them from the street as it drew nearer.

  Wildman took another look backwards into the street far below. Returned his gaze to Jack. He didn’t look angry any more. He was calm.

  ‘C’mon, Wildman.’ Jack had adopted a cajoling note now. ‘There’s no escape from this. Gwen here, behind me, you’ve seen her. She’s called the police. So even if you get past me – and you won’t – you wouldn’t beat the cordon around this building. Come away from the edge now, carefully.’

  ‘Are you going to read me my rights?’ smiled Wildman.

  ‘You’re in the custody of Torchwood now. We’re not the police. We do things differently. But you’d know that already, from your work at Blaidd Drwg, wouldn’t you? And that means you know we can help you, Wildman. Whatever the problem is.’

  Wildman raised his left arm, slowly so that it wouldn’t alarm his captor. Studied the chunky watch that poked out beyond his soiled cuffs. ‘Time of death…’ he murmured to himself. He lowered his arm, and studied his feet with a look that suggested he had never seen them before, or perhaps that they were the most fascinating things in the whole room.

  Gwen thought she saw Jack’s arm tense up. ‘Don’t fool around, Wildman. I can take you out from here.’

  Wildman looked up from his shoes. He stared past Jack, at Gwen. He was grinning now, like it was all a huge joke. He switched the grin back to Jack.

  ‘See you again,’ he said cheerfully.

  Wildman allowed himself to fall. His feet didn’t move. His arms remained calmly by his side. He just dropped backwards, as though it was a trust exercise and someone was going to catch him.

  But no one could catch him. The green netting parted soundlessly behind him. Guy Wildman was still smiling as he plunged backwards, head first, and tumbled to his death.

  FOUR

  Gwen pushed her way through the police cordon. Her words were ‘excuse me’ and ‘sorry’ as she moved the police constables aside, but her tone was ‘get out of my way’. She knew that coppers responded to the sound of authority, were less likely to question her seniority because they were accustomed to simply obeying orders that were spoken clearly and unambiguously. It was a technique she’d seen the other Torchwood members use, even the more reserved Toshiko. Gwen was still trying to be polite about it. Unlike Owen, who was more likely to wave his ID, shout ‘Coming through!’ and then barge his way past. Sounding more assertive meant that Gwen got things done faster, got to her destination sooner. Not that Wildman was likely to be going anywhere in a hurry, mind. His last journey had come to an abrupt end after only a few seconds.

  ‘Sorry… Excuse me… Thanks… Keep those pedestrians back there, please…’

  The only time it was awkward was when she came across her former colleagues. Like now. The blue flashing light of the nearby police car strobed over the chubby features of Andy Davidson. Once upon a time, he’d been showing her the ropes. Today, she was asking him to stay behind them.

  ‘We’ve got to stop meeting like this,’ Andy said to her. But she noticed that he still held the yellow-and-black cor
don tape up for her. ‘People will start to talk.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, stooping under the tape. ‘I imagine people are talking anyway, aren’t they Andy?’

  ‘Special Ops?’ he said. ‘Bound to have tongues wagging, isn’t it?’

  Gwen chose not to answer his next, unspoken, question: What is your job now, Gwen? She let Andy guide her down the road, and along the length of a bendy bus that seemed to have stalled in the middle of the carriageway.

  ‘Can this be moved?’ she asked him.

  ‘Wait and see,’ he replied.

  They rounded the front end of the bus. The windscreen was a crazed spider’s web of splintered glass, 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 bumper, like a target that had Wildman’s head in its dead centre under the front of the bus.

  ‘Scraped 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 embarrassed 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?’

  Toshiko’s head appeared through the driver’s side window. ‘He’s in no fit state to drive.’

  ‘You can bloody 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 bloody 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 bugger 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 attitude 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.

  Toshiko 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?’ Toshiko 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 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,’ Toshiko said. ‘He screamed. Threw his arms about like he was trying to grab the air and hold on.’

  ‘Flailing,’ offered Owen. ‘Thrashing about he was. Desperate.’

  ‘It was only a few seconds, I suppose, but it sounded like…’ Toshiko’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.’

  Toshiko 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. ‘Refreshingly free from the technobollocks you usually give us.’

  Toshiko 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 Assembler 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 boobs 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 yo
u. 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 partition 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 shit. 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 carcass in there too.’

  ‘Quit griping. That car’s deceptively spacious,’ Jack told him. ‘Gwen and I will take the other vehicle.’