Something in the Water (8 page)

‘It’s running. Should be finished by now.’ Owen hurried across to his workstation and punched up the test results. ‘Now we can see what’s what.’ The screen filled with streams of chemical equations and graphs. Owen frowned, and tapped some keys. Data scrolled up the screen, and his eyes darted from side to side as he took it in. ‘That’s wrong,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s gotta be …’

‘What’s up?’ Jack joined him at the workstation.

‘Doesn’t make sense. The test must have mis-run.’

‘Why?’

Owen tapped the screen. ‘There’s nothing wrong with this blood. It’s perfectly normal O-negative. Cell count, blood gases, they’re all spot on.’

‘Which means …?’

‘Whatever Bob Strong’s got, it isn’t a disease.’ He sat forward and typed quickly, more urgently. The screen flicked and changed and began filling up with more information. ‘I’ve hacked into the main NHS database. It’s just a thought, but … Yeah, here we go. Look at this: massive spike in respiratory complaints in the last few weeks, right across the region. Way above the seasonal average.’

‘So what is it? A flu epidemic? Big deal; these people still think it’s news when there’s another outbreak of measles. Let me know when it’s Martian Flu.’

‘I told Strong it was probably a new strain of flu, but I doubt it is. And so does he, in all honesty. GPs are pretty clued up on influenza, even foreign strains of the usual A, B and C viruses. The Government has a major vaccination programme in place in case there’s an outbreak or a pandemic. But this doesn’t fit the flu profile.’

A quiet cough signalled Ianto’s presence. ‘Excuse me. I’ve just had word from Gwen – they’ve arrived.’

Jack clapped his hands. ‘Great. Let’s see what the cat’s dragged in.’

Owen gestured at his screen. ‘What about this?’

‘It’s still as much a matter for the medical profession as for Torchwood. I hear what you’re saying, and we’ll tag it for a follow up.’ Jack headed towards the Autopsy Room. ‘Right now, you’ve got another dead body to look at. Maybe you can find a connection?’

Owen bit his lip, considering the information on the screen for a second longer. Then he twisted out of his seat and followed Jack.

Gwen and Toshiko were just coming into the Hub. The strobe lights were still flashing as the massive cog-wheel vault door rolled slowly back into position behind them with its customary grinding rattle. Gwen looked tired but glad to be back at base.

Toshiko, on the other hand, just looked wet. Very wet.

Jack paused at the top of the stairs and looked down at her with a grin. ‘Hey, Tosh, when I said we’d see what the cat’s dragged in, I didn’t think it was gonna be you!’

Owen joined him and broke into a laugh.

‘Owen, don’t say a word.’ Toshiko glared up at him. Her face was streaked with dirt, as if she’d been lying face down in a puddle. Her hair was bedraggled and her clothes were soaked through and stained with mud. A pool of dingy water spread out across the concrete where she stood.

Ianto, with only the faintest of tuts, appeared with a number of old newspapers to put down on the floor and a clean towel for Toshiko. She thanked him icily as she took the towel and shivered. Ianto then busied himself spreading the paper out on the concrete, soaking up the water and clumps of congealed mud and grass. ‘There is a doormat upstairs, you know. Several, in fact.’

‘What the hell happened?’ Jack asked, grinning.

‘Slight accident in the marshland,’ Gwen said. ‘We wandered off the path at Greendown Moss. Big mistake.’

‘That’s a relief,’ Owen said with a sardonic smile. ‘For a moment I thought you’d been mud-wrestling together and I’d missed it.’

‘In your dreams.’

‘Only when I’m bored, girls. Only when I’m bored.’

Without another word, Toshiko went to get herself cleaned up. Gwen reported to Jack in his office.

‘Your friend Professor Len was … interesting. Not your type, I’d have thought.’

‘Really?’

‘Sort of … grungy.’

‘So he’s let himself go. But he was a great guy. We had a thing together in the early seventies.’ Jack smiled warmly at the memory.

‘Yes,’ Gwen said thoughtfully, ‘he sent his fondest. But we didn’t find any ghosts.’

‘Ianto said you found a corpse, which is a start.’

‘That was later. First we searched Greendown Moss. There was definitely something there – Tosh picked up another Rift spark, but we couldn’t get a fix on it, didn’t see anything.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ muttered Owen.

‘Ignore him,’ Jack told Gwen. ‘He’s just sore because he lost an alien in a fish farm.’

Owen pointed at himself and mouthed
I’m sore …
? incredulously.

Gwen said, ‘How’d you get on with Big Guy, then?’

‘He’s in the Morgue. Some unidentified extraterrestrial opened him up like a—’

‘So far we’ve had a packet of crisps and a tin of tuna,’ commented Jack.

‘—baked potato,’ Owen finished triumphantly. He looked from one to the other. ‘No?’

‘Almost a meal,’ said Gwen. ‘Which reminds me – I’m hungry. Anyone for pizza?’

‘Already ordered,’ announced Ianto smoothly as he handed her a mug of hot chocolate.

‘Thanks, Ianto. You are a treasure, you know that?’

He smiled. ‘As a matter of fact, I do.’

‘Tosh stepped off the path and got stuck in the mud.’ Gwen sipped the chocolate carefully. ‘At least I thought it was mud, but it turned out to be a bog or something and before we knew it she was sinking.’

Owen sniggered, shaking his head. ‘Oh, I’d have paid money to have seen that.’

Gwen glared at him. ‘She’s lucky to be alive. If it hadn’t been for Professor Len, she’d be dead.’

‘Wouldn’t we all?’ said Jack. He stood up and clapped his hands. ‘So – where’s the body?’

EIGHT

Len Morgan trudged across Greendown Moss, hands deep in the pockets of his parka. It was bitingly cold out here, even at this time of year, and the wind was making his nose run continuously. Every time he put a boot down in the mud, he could feel icy fingers grabbing at his feet. For most people, a walk across the Moss would be a risky undertaking in good weather. In these conditions it was positively dangerous. Many people had met their deaths out here, and it was apparently nothing to do with Sally Blackteeth. They just sank in the mud, slipped beneath the Moss and drowned.

But not Professor Len. He knew the bog too well, and he knew Sally Blackteeth.

There was a thick mist hanging around the trees of Grey Copse. He could see the branches of the silver birch stretching up towards the white sky, but that was all. The mist closed around him as he stepped into the trees, welcoming him to another, colder, more mysterious world.

‘That was a bloody stupid thing to do,’ he said.

A dark figure emerged from the mist close by. ‘You can talk.’

Len shivered. He knew better than to look at the figure directly. It was enough that he could hear the moist sucking noise it made as it moved slowly behind him. He never heard a footstep, only the faint, wet sound of its breath.

‘I couldn’t help it,’ he said. ‘They insisted.’

‘You brought them here.’

‘I had to. I owed someone a favour.’

‘A favour? You don’t owe anybody anything – except me.’

‘This one goes back a long way. Before I met you.’

‘Huh. So who is this person? The one you owe a favour to that’s more important than the one you owe me. Come on – who is it?’

‘You don’t need to know that.’ Professor Len licked his lips, sensing trouble. ‘I only came to apologise. I know I shouldn’t have brought them here – but you shouldn’t have given them that corpse.’

‘Consider it a gift.’

‘They took the body back with them.’

‘I expected them to.’

‘It’s a mistake,’ Professor Len insisted bravely. ‘They’ll examine it, check into it.’

‘Good luck to them.’

‘They won’t let it go. They were here for a reason. These people don’t do anything without a reason.’

‘Good. Neither do I.’

Len bit his lip, raised a hand to rub at his beard. He was torn with indecision, and he could sense that his next words were being waited for.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘These people – they’re special. They’re unique. They call themselves Torchwood.’

There was a noise like a stake being driven into moist earth. It wasn’t a gasp of surprise or shock. It was a snort of derision. ‘Torchwood. I don’t fear them. Never have done.’

‘But they won’t let it lie. Something’s brought them here to the Moss. It’s not you – it’s some kind of disturbance in time, they said …’

Another hiss of disdain. ‘They have no idea what they’re dealing with.’

‘I just thought you ought to know.’

‘Why?’

‘Because … because I want to protect you.’

‘Rubbish. It’s because you think I’ll spare your life.’

Professor Len was trembling now, and it wasn’t due to the cold. He couldn’t even feel his body any more. Snot ran down his lip but he didn’t even think of wiping it away. ‘I don’t want to die! It wasn’t my idea to give them the body. You did that, not me.’

‘You can’t protect me. I know all about Torchwood. And I know all about Jack Harkness. He’s the man you think you owe your life to, isn’t he? The favour! How sweet. But it doesn’t matter. It’s done now.’

Professor Len swallowed, his mouth dry. ‘You mean I can go?’

‘Look at me.’

‘No.’

‘Look at me.’

Professor Len glanced up, aware that someone had moved in front of him. At first he could see nothing except the mist and the ghosts of the trees around him. There was a smell like rotting cabbage and peat mixed with the faintest trace of a butcher’s yard, and then he saw his companion.

‘There,’ she said. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

He shook his head miserably. ‘No,’ he whispered.

‘Good,’ she said, smiling. And then, with one swift stroke, she sliced his neck open, deep enough to expose the vertebrae at the back, just before the blood surged up and out in a huge red fountain.

NINE

The corpse was laid out on the table in the Autopsy Room underneath a ring of brilliant exam lights. It was old and in an advanced state of decay. The skin had withered into a dark, leathery carapace stretched over wasted muscle and tendon. Some of the joints were exposed, yellowed bone just visible beneath the skein of mud that still covered the entire body.

It was still wearing the remnants of trousers and a sweater, but these were little more than scraps of material stiffened by the preserving effects of the soil. Closer examination revealed small invertebrates still making a home in the damp crevices.

The head was little more than a hairless skull with eyes crusted over behind blackened lids. The lips were partly eaten away to reveal the remains of yellow teeth.

‘Definitely human,’ announced Owen, now wearing his white lab coat, ‘judging by the orthodontic work. Five fillings and a cap.’

He stood in the well of the Autopsy Room while the others watched from the walkway above. There was a deck of monitoring equipment at the end of the table, and a camera filming the autopsy. Owen circled the corpse, making a number of routine observations before attempting any invasive exploration.

‘The body is male, adult, although it’s not possible at this stage to make a guess at its age.’

‘Guess anyway,’ advised Jack. He stood in his shirtsleeves, arms folded. ‘You never know, you may be right.’

Owen looked up at him. ‘Who, me?’ he said sarcastically. He straightened up and shrugged, fiddling with the badges which speckled the lapels of his white coat. ‘All right: at a very rough guess, I’d say he was aged between twenty and a hundred.’

‘You’re uncanny, Owen. Narrow it down.’

‘Your age,’ Owen said, without missing a beat.

Jack smiled but said nothing.

‘Is there no way of telling who he was?’ Gwen asked.

‘I checked the missing persons records from the late seventies to the early eighties,’ Ianto said. ‘There are plenty of candidates, obviously. We need more data from the body before we can start sifting.’

‘What if it was a tramp?’ asked Gwen. ‘They wouldn’t necessarily be reported as missing, would they?’

‘I hate the thought of someone never being missed,’ said Ianto sadly. ‘It’s the ultimate humiliation, surely. So unimportant in life that no one even notices when you die.’

‘Theories, anyone?’ prompted Jack. He looked impatient.

‘Your old mate Professor Len was telling Tosh and me about a local witch who used to drag unlucky suitors down into the bog,’ said Gwen. ‘According to him, the last reported victim of Sally Blackteeth went missing on Greendown Moss in 1974.’

‘You think this could be him?’

‘It’s possible.’

Jack nodded. ‘Find out. Get in touch with Professor Len.’ He turned to Owen. ‘Can you tell how he died?’

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ Owen said. ‘Initial observations: there’s no obvious sign of violence or mutilation. No broken bones that I can detect thus far. There appears to be some swelling of the neck and throat, but it’s not consistent with strangling. Probably the result of drowning.’

‘He was in the middle of the marsh.’

Owen smiled humourlessly. ‘Wandered off the path, got stuck in the mud. No Professor Len around to help him when he got that sinking feeling. Glug, glug, glug …’

‘That could have been me,’ said Toshiko quietly. She had just appeared on the steps besides Jack, having showered and changed. All Torchwood personnel routinely kept a change of clothes in the Hub in case of emergencies.

‘My, doesn’t she scrub up well?’ said Owen.

‘Leave it out, Owen,’ snapped Gwen. ‘She’s had a bad fright.’

‘Not as big a fright as this guy had,’ Owen gestured at the corpse. ‘The thing is, and call me Mr Boring if you must, but I don’t see what’s so extraordinary about this corpse. He drowned in the marsh. It’s a police matter.’

‘No,’ said Jack firmly. ‘It’s a Torchwood matter. Tosh?’

Toshiko held up a hand scanner. ‘Residual temporal energy all over it. If he didn’t actually come through the Rift, then he was touched by something that did. That makes it our business.’