Torchwood: Slow Decay (21 page)

He shrugged, embarrassed. ‘A little.’

‘How?’

‘Cutting out carbohydrates. Cutting down on the drinking. More walking.’

‘Rugby practice, obviously.’

‘Did you like that? I thought it was quite inventive.’ A pause. ‘And Lucy recommended some tablets she’d been taking,’ he said, offhandedly. ‘They worked on her.’

‘Yes, we should obviously let Lucy be our role model on things involving food.’

‘Ouch. Point taken.’ He shook his head. ‘This still feels like a dream to me. It’s all moving too fast. I can’t take it in.’

‘Part of that’s the shock. It’ll pass. Tell you what – let’s get a hotel room for tonight. A treat for the both of us. We can go back to the flat tomorrow. It’s Sunday, so that still gives us a day to recover before you go back to work – assuming you’re fit.’

‘That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.’

It would also, Gwen thought, give the rest of the Torchwood team time to investigate. There might be some clues back at the flat they needed to look for, something that might say where Lucy had gone. And, of course, the last thing she wanted was for her and Rhys to go back to the flat, fall asleep, and then wake up with Lucy bending over them, madness in her eyes, poised to rip their throats out.

Threesomes like
that
really didn’t interest Gwen.

‘What’s a nice boy like you doing in a place like this?’

Owen laughed. The flagstones were cold beneath his crossed legs, and his vertebrae were grinding against the armoured glass behind him, yet he felt strangely comfortable. ‘I sometimes ask myself the same question. I thought I’d be well on my way to being a surgeon by now.’

Marianne was sitting with her back against the glass in her cell, mirror image to his position. Their heads were separated by just a few inches of space. He could almost feel the heat from her body through the glass. Almost.

‘Was that the big life plan?’ she asked.

‘Yeah, I thought so. Seven years of training and I still had it in my sights. Spent a year as a junior houseman at Cardiff Royal Infirmary. Then I blinked, and when I looked again it was gone.’

‘And you ended up here.’

‘Yeah.’ He looked around, at the crumbling bricks and the lichen. At the rusted metal and the trickling water. ‘I ended up here.’

‘So you were at the Infirmary, but you’re not Welsh, are you?’

He laughed. ‘You can tell?’

‘The accent.’

He paused. Thinking. ‘Yeah, I’m from the East End. Plaistow. Terraced houses and council estates and old pubs. You could hear the Hammers playing at home from the back bedroom. Big cheer whenever they scored. Big groan when the goal went against them. I used to lie there and listen, Saturday afternoons. Used to make up my own commentary, as well.’

‘So why did you go to medical school?’

Good question, and one he tried not to think about too often. ‘Most of my friends ended up as car mechanics or estate agents. I could see all that ahead of me, and I couldn’t face it. I wanted to do something that
meant
something. And then…’

‘Go on,’ she said softly.

‘And then my dad died. Just upped and died. We found him in the bedroom one morning, slumped against the wall. He was wearing his shirt and his boxers and he had one sock off and one still in his hand. He looked… he looked like someone had said something to him that he couldn’t quite hear, and he was trying to work out what it was. One of the arteries in his chest had just given way. Aortic aneurysm, it’s called. I’ve done all the lectures, and I’ve seen photos in textbooks, and I’ve conducted autopsies of people who’ve died that way, but for me an aortic aneurysm will always be my dad, sitting there, one bare foot, and frowning.’

His face was wet. Tears were slipping from his eyes and spreading out across his cheeks leaving coldness behind. He hadn’t even realised he was crying. The grief was something separate from him that his body could get on with while he was talking.

‘I’m sorry,’ Marianne said.

‘And that’s why I became a doctor.’

‘So you could save people like your father?’

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘So I could stop the same thing happening to me.’

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Then: ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Tapanuli fever.’

‘About what?’

‘Tapanuli fever. This thing I’ve got.’

For a moment the flagstones seemed to tilt under Owen’s backside. He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Then he remembered. Tapanuli fever. He’d told her she’d been infected with a tropical disease and she was in an isolation ward.

‘Oh, yeah, Tapanuli fever. Used to be known as the Black Formosa Corruption, back in Victorian days. Endemic to a few small regions of… er… South America. Argentina. I’m guessing that someone in Cardiff’s just got back from doin’ missionary work out there or something.’

‘I’ve never heard of it.’

Not surprising, considering he’d made it up. ‘It’s very rare. Like Ebola. Nobody’d heard of that until there was a sudden spate of deaths.’

‘And is that what’s going to happen to me?’ She was trying to be offhand, but he could hear the catch in her voice. ‘What’s the mortality rate? Isn’t that what you call it – “mortality rate”?’

Almost involuntarily, his right hand reached out as if to take hers and squeeze it reassuringly, but all it encountered was smooth, cold glass. After a moment there was a small
thud
as something hit the glass on the other side. Her hand, seeking his.

‘I won’t let you die,’ he said.

‘You didn’t answer the question.’

‘We just don’t know. In the jungle—’

Did they have jungle in South America? Or was it pampas? What the hell
was
pampas, anyway?

‘—In the jungle, half the people who catch it die. But we’ve got you under observation, and we can treat it with antibiotics and stuff. I
won’t
let you die.’

‘You’ve got me isolated. It must be very contagious.’

‘We have to take precautions.’

‘You haven’t even given me any antibiotics. You’ve just left me here, waiting.’

‘The tests. We’re looking at the results of the tests. Then we can treat the disease.’

Perhaps, he wondered, he could give her an injection. Just distilled water, but he could tell her it was an antibiotic. It might help her cope.

‘I wish I could see my family,’ Marianne said wistfully. ‘They could just stand the other side of the glass, couldn’t they?’

Owen knew that he shouldn’t be talking to her this way, but he couldn’t help himself. Jack would have told him to just leave her alone – do whatever tests were necessary and not engage in conversation – but he couldn’t do that. Unlike most of the people and the things that had ended up in the cells, she didn’t know what was happening to her. She needed reassurance.

She needed a friend.

‘They’ve been notified,’ Owen told her, ‘but they’ve got to stay away. We’re paid to take risks, here. They’re not.’

‘Could I write them a letter?’

He squeezed his eyes shut. Beneath the thin layer of chirpiness she put on, there was a deep chasm of vulnerability and fear. And he wasn’t sure whether he was making things worse or better. ‘Too risky. We’d have to spray the letter with antibiotics and stuff, to kill any bacteria, and the words’d just smudge and run off. It wouldn’t look pretty.’

‘Neither will I, if this goes on for much longer. I can’t wash, I can’t take a bath, and I haven’t got a change of clothes.’

‘Clothes we can find,’ Owen said quickly. ‘And I can probably get a bowl of hot water and some soap as well. If it’s any consolation, you still look great.’

‘Thanks. I bet you say that to all the dying girls in your care.’

‘Only the beautiful ones.’

‘Actually, some hot water would be nice. I must smell awful.’ She paused. ‘Talking of which, there’s a really crappy smell in this place, and it’s not me. It smells like the elephant house at the zoo. You know – that smell you get from things that eat hay all the time and then let it fester.’

It was probably the Weevil at the other end of the block, Owen thought, but he couldn’t tell her that. ‘It’s the drains. This area of the… hospital… hasn’t been used for a while. There’s probably all kinds of stuff down there. I’ll get someone to take a look at them.’

‘At the very least you could get an air freshener.’

‘Consider it done.’

‘Thanks, Owen.’

He felt a shiver run through him at the sound of his name, said in her soft Welsh lilt. There was something almost erotic in talking to her and yet not seeing her. If they’d been face to face in a bar then he would have been touching her arm by now, gazing into her eyes, smiling, looking away and then looking back. But now, like this, it was like talking on the phone, but with the added
frisson
that she was only a few inches away from him. Close enough that he could hear her breathe; feel the glass vibrate if she shifted position.

‘Owen,’ she said, ‘can I ask you a question?’

‘Nothing’s stopped you yet.’

‘Is there someone else down here with me? Someone else in isolation?’

‘What makes you think that?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Never answer a question with another question,’ she said, a laugh in her voice; ‘it sounds evasive. I thought I heard someone moving around. I tried talking to them, but they didn’t answer.’

Marianne was at one end of the block of cells; the Weevil was at the other. ‘You probably heard a nurse moving around,’ he said, putting as much sincerity into his voice as he could. And Owen was the past master at faking sincerity.

‘You’re lying to me. I think there is someone there. I think they’ve got the same thing as I have, this Tapanuli fever. And I reckon they’re even further gone than I am. Is that what I can look forward to: losing the ability to talk, just shuffling around in this awful place until I die? Is that what it’s come to?’

‘I won’t let that happen, Marianne.’

‘How can you stop it?’ Her voice sounded muffled.

‘I don’t know yet, but I will. I promise, I will.’

He turned to face her, twisting around on the flagstones, but Marianne still had her back to him. Her face was buried in her hands, and her shoulders were shaking with the effort of holding back the tears.

Grangetown was the opposite of an up-and-coming area. It was down-and-going, if that meant anything. Gwen had spent a lot of time there when she was in the police – raiding houses, breaking up family feuds, making door-to-door inquiries – and the place still made her feel like someone was watching her, all the time. All the vegetation – the trees, the bushes, the flowers in the gardens – looked dry and faded. Desperation and curdled anger seemed to seep from the drains and the gutters. The place had a kind of leaden gravitational pull that made it easy to get in and much harder to get out again.

Gwen was sure that when she’d first arrived, parking her car around the corner and walking into the road she wanted, hands in pockets and looking casual, the first person she saw reached for a mobile phone. Maybe she was imagining things, but she could almost feel the invisible web of warnings fanning out from that one person: watch out, there’s a stranger in the street. Might be the police.

The flat that Lucy shared with her junkie boyfriend was about halfway along the street. Gwen paused by the gate and looked at the outside. The curtains were drawn. One window was cracked. The house had been converted into flats: the hall appeared to have been divided, and there were two doors, one that presumably led to the ground floor and the other giving access to the stairs up to the first floor. Paint was peeling off both doors, and weeds formed a border along the junction between the concrete of the front garden and the walls and the front step.

She rang the bell for the right-hand door. Judging by the fact that the house to the left had its door next to this one, the stairs were on the left of the hall, meaning that the right-hand door gave access to the ground floor, where Lucy lived. She was there looking for Lucy, and if she just opened the door it would make Gwen’s job easier. Alternatively, if her boyfriend opened the door it would save Gwen the trouble of having to break in.

Breaking and entering. How had it come to this? If there was one thing they had drummed into her in the police force it was that in order to enforce the law they had to uphold it. By committing minor infringements – illegal entry, planting evidence, forcing a suspect to confess to something they hadn’t done – all the police did was to abandon the moral high ground. It didn’t matter that they were doing it in the name of the greater good; by doing it, they subverted the greater good. They became criminals arresting criminals, which turned the whole thing into a glorified gang war.

And yet here she was, just about to break into someone’s house, with a gun tucked into the waistband of her trousers. Prepared to do anything – even kill, if it was necessary in order to preserve her own life – and all in the name of the greater good. All in the name of saving the human race from the dark things that hid in the darkness, waiting for their chance to get in.

She shivered. What was it about Grangetown that made her suddenly feel dirty and old?

She rang the bell again, but there was no answer. Slipping her hand in her pocket, she took out a Leatherman, a multi-purpose folding tool that one of her police colleagues had introduced her to. The thinking person’s Swiss Army Knife, he had called it. Quickly she folded out a flat knife blade. Making it look as if she was putting a key into the Yale lock then, blocking her hand with her body, she slipped the blade into the gap between the door and the jamb and, while she levered the blade, she used her shoulder to apply pressure to the door. Most locks only engaged for a few millimetres or so, due to clumsy fitting, and some pressure in the right place could just ease the cam of the lock away from the housing.

And it worked. The door gave under her shoulder, and she quickly eased her fingers around the wood as it moved, trying to ensure that it didn’t suddenly fly in, banging on the wall.

Gwen moved into the shadowed hall and closed the door behind her, partly so she didn’t alert anyone in the house to her presence, partly so she didn’t alert anyone in the street to something unusual, and partly so her eyes could adjust more quickly to the darkness.