Slow Decay

FOUR

Rhys took a deep breath, braced himself, and looked in the mirror.

God. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The morning sun streaming in through the bathroom window cast a harsh light across his face, shadowing it in all the wrong places and showing up bumps and odd little creases that he didn’t even know he possessed. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, thinking — if he’d thought about it at all — that it lent him a reckless, Colin Farrell vibe but, combined with the baggy skin under his eyes, it just made him look like a down-and-out who’d been sleeping in the rain for too long. The skin of his cheeks and temples was gritty, and he could have sworn that the flesh on his neck — the red-rashed, chicken-skin flesh on his neck — was looser than he remembered. Jesus, was he getting jowls! He was, he was actually getting jowls!

Rhys shook his head in disbelief. When had all this happened? When had he gotten old? The last time he’d taken a good look at himself he’d been young, fit and carefree. His eyes had been bright, his skin clear and his stomach as flat and as hard as a butcher’s slab.

But now…

He looked down, knowing he wasn’t going to like what he saw. And he was right. The bulge of his beer gut wasn’t anywhere near big enough to hide his feet, but it was getting to the point where he’d have to take polaroids of his wedding tackle so he could remember what it all looked like.

Was this what Gwen saw whenever she looked at him? He groaned. No wonder she spent so much time out at work. He was a mess.

They’d had a long conversation, on the way back from the Indian Summer. It was probably the most serious conversation they’d ever had, apart from that hesitant, ‘Are you on the pill?’ ‘No — do you have any condoms?’ exchange the first night they met. They’d started off talking about Lucy, and how Rhys reckoned she needed a safe place to stay. Gwen had ducked the issue, making some sarcastic comment, and then she had started talking about the two of them and where they were going with their lives. Rhys was worried that she was winding herself up towards saying she wanted children, but fortunately her thoughts hadn’t got that far along the road to the future. She was just worried they were drifting apart. The spark just wasn’t there any more. He’d agreed, more because she was talking and he needed to throw in the occasional ‘Yeah’ and ‘I know’ to show that he wasn’t thinking about something else, but looking at himself in the mirror now he had a pretty good idea why they were drifting apart.

When was the last time they’d been out to a gig? When had they last gone clubbing? When had they last spent money on something frivolous, something that wasn’t for the flat or the car or dinner?

Somewhere along the way, they’d lost the fun.

He was turning into his father, that’s what was happening.

Taking a deep breath, he began running through a list of all the things that would have to change in the flat. Radio 2, for a start. That would have to go. He’d found himself tuning to it more and more, while cooking food or tidying up, but despite the catchy tunes and the humorous banter of the presenters, it would have to vanish from the radio’s memory. Radio 2 was the kind of thing he remembered his dad listening to. It wasn’t called ‘easy listening’ for nothing. Radio 1 from now on — or, even better, one of the cutting-edge broadcasters that had sprung up with the advent of digital radio. Something radical. Something that would make him feel young again.

The fridge would need some clearing. Get rid of all the milk and replace it with skimmed, for a start. Or, even better, that soya stuff. The bread would have to go: no more cheese on toast of an evening. All that pasta in the cupboard was now surplus to requirements. And he’d go out later and get lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. He and Gwen could revolutionise their eating habits overnight. No more takeaways, no more Indian restaurants, just salads and healthy living.

No more takeaways. No more Indian restaurants.

And no more beer.

That would be the killer, but that was what had led him to this state in the first place. He let his hand caress his belly. You’re going to have to go, my son. We’ve had some fun together, you and I, but if I need to sacrifice you to keep Gwen then that’s what I’m going to do.

A gym? They were expensive, and having now taken a long hard look at himself in the mirror, Rhys was reluctant to let anyone else see him in this state, sweating and panting on a rowing machine. There had to be another way. Football? Perhaps he could get together with a few mates and form a team, enter one of the amateur leagues. The daydream made him smile for a few moments, before reality came crashing in. How many men did he see on Sunday mornings down the park, running around a pitch for a few minutes and then stopping, hands on thighs, gasping for breath? Football didn’t seem to be doing them any good.

And then he remembered a snatch of conversation from the previous night. Lucy, talking about a diet clinic, and how the weight had just melted away from her. Something herbal, she’d said.

That was it. When Rhys got into work, he’d get the address of this diet clinic off Lucy, and he’d make an appointment.

The future suddenly looked very bright. Gwen didn’t know it, but Rhys intended to become a new man, just for her.

‘So which one of us is Ant, then?’ Owen asked. He spread the photographs out across the metal surface of the autopsy table, sliding them around as best he could until he had a two-dimensional representation of a dead Weevil, life-sized, made out of A3 close-ups.

‘Which one’s the straight one?’ Jack asked. He was prowling around the darkened balcony of the forensic lab like a tiger.

Owen thought for a moment, then swapped the photographs of the left and right hands over. ‘They’re both straight. Or they’re both funny, depending what you mean by “straight”.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive.’ He stood back, admiring his handiwork. He had to admit, in the absence of a real Weevil corpse it wasn’t at all bad. If he half-closed his eyes, it almost looked as if there was an actual body on the table. Not one that he could cut open, of course, but one he could examine minutely if he wished. Toshiko had offered to take several different digital images of the same areas and turn them into a 3-D virtual image, but there was something about the physicality of the images that appealed to him. It was a bit like looking at X-rays. The images were about the same size.

‘All right, which one’s got the most charisma?’

Owen thought for a moment. ‘Actually, they both look like Chuckie dolls.’

‘Chuckie dolls?’ Jack asked, still moving.

‘Evil plastic children’s toys turned serial killers.’

‘I must’ve been away that week. Jeez, you take a few days off with the flu and you miss an entire invasion attempt. I hope you guys wrote it up for the record.’

Owen glanced up at him to check whether he was serious or not, but this was Jack, and it was impossible to tell. He might have been serious; he might have been joking. He might have been both at the same time — Jack was like that. ‘Er… yeah, we wrote it up. Ianto has all the Chuckie dolls preserved in the Archive. Ask him about it.’

Jack was behind Owen now, looking down at the Weevil image. ‘Ant or Dec? Ant or Dec? Remind me — why are we choosing sides?’

‘For when these photographs get out on the Internet and we have to pretend that we faked them in order to discredit the whole thing. Like in the film.’

Owen could hear the shudder in Jack’s voice. ‘Jeez, I’m not going through that again.’

Owen looked up at him. ‘What — you were involved with that? Faking the Roswell footage?’

‘No, I meant I don’t want to go through seeing the film again. That’s two hours of my life I’d rather have dedicated to gargling rhino dung.’

‘Have you ever-’

‘Don’t go there.’

‘Watch me backing away.’ Owen walked around to the other side of the table and took a closer look at the Weevil’s half-eaten face, then tracked down the neck to the chest. It was hard to make out, but there were structures half-revealed through the tears in the flesh that bore no relationship to ribs. This was going to require a lot of careful study.

‘What about cause of death?’ Jack asked.

‘Little to add to what you spotted back at the warehouse. Something chewed on its face, neck and chest. The tooth-marks are clear on the flesh and on the bone — or at least what passes for bone in Weevils. I can do a plaster cast and a quick computer animation to tell you what kind of teeth, but I’m guessing it has to be something really quite frightening in order to subdue a young Weevil and chew its face away.’

‘Young?’

Owen nodded. ‘Barely out of its teens, judging by the size. If you put this one next to the one we have down in the cells, this would definitely be the lesser of two Weevils.’ He glanced up at Jack. ‘OK, moving on. The initial attack was quick, but I think it severed a major blood vessel — or the next best thing in Weevils. It bled out, while its attacker was still chewing away.’

Jack looked sceptical. ‘There wasn’t much blood at the warehouse.’

‘I know. I think the attacker drank most of it as it gushed out.’

‘You can tell that just from an examination of the body?’

‘No,’ Owen admitted, ‘I just have an active imagination.’

The police station was simultaneously familiar and alien to Gwen as she walked through the largest of the open-plan offices, surrounded by police officers busy filing reports and making calls, separated from each other by shoulder-high dividers. Familiar, because she had spent a couple of relatively happy years there, walking its institutionally painted corridors, smelling the bacon butties all the way from the canteen to the interview rooms, putting her street clothes in her battered grey locker at the beginning of every shift and getting them out again at the end. Alien, because it was all behind her now. She’d moved on. Grown up. It was like coming back to school after you’d left: you suddenly noticed all the little things you’d been used to before — the cracked paint, the battered corners on the corridors where trolleys of files had bashed into them, the coffee stains on the carpets. And everything seemed so much smaller, and so much drabber.

‘You’ve got a nerve, showing your face around here!’

She turned, startled.

‘Mitch?’

‘Surprised you remember us, now you’re running with that Torchwood mob.’

She grinned. ‘I couldn’t forget you. We shared chips at three in the morning too many times for that. You’ve shaved your moustache off. You looked better when you had it.’

Jimmy Mitchell didn’t return the grin, or the banter. His face was set in a scowl that brought his heavy eyebrows together in a dark line and put a crease in the centre of his forehead. ‘Don’t try and sweet-talk me, Gwen. We know you removed evidence from the crime scene, and all we get told by the bosses is that we should proceed with the case with whatever evidence we have left.’

‘I promise you this, Mitch — whatever we took was incidental to your case, but vital to ours.’

‘Can I have that in writing?’

‘Bugger off.’ She smiled, to show there were no hard feelings. ‘What’s the story on the nightclub deaths, then?’

Mitch shrugged. ‘Looking like a self-contained thing. Five lads got into a fight and inflicted fatal wounds on each other. We’ve got all the weapons, including the broken bottles. Only thing is, we don’t know what they were fighting about. There were video cameras all over the club, relaying pictures to screens inside so the clubbers — narcissistic shits that they are — can see one another, and the management record everything just in case of trouble, but there’s nothing there to give us any clue. One moment they’re talking; the next minute they’re fighting; then they’re dead.’

‘Can you run me off a DVD copy of the video footage?’

He thrust his chin out pugnaciously. ‘Only if I can see whatever your people removed from the club.’

‘No way.’

‘That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.’

Gwen thought for a moment. ‘See, but not touch or take.’

He nodded. ‘I just need to make sure it’s not something we need to worry about — drugs, guns or stuff.’

‘It’s not. But I’ll bring it anyway. That café round the corner — the one that does the espresso strong enough to stand your spoon up in? Three o’clock?’

Mitch’s face relaxed slightly. ‘Look, kid — I know you’ve done good for yourself. Whatever Torchwood is, it’s got high-level cover. You people must be doing a phenomenal job. Whatever you hear, whatever we say, it’s not personal, OK? It’s just…’ He paused, groping for the right word. ‘It’s just jealousy, I guess. You turn up in your fancy car, with your fancy clothes, and you waltz into our crime scenes like you’re better than us.’

‘But isn’t that the same way you treat the Police Support Officers?’ Gwen asked.

‘Yeah, but we are better than them. What’s your point?’

‘No point. Can I have that DVD now?’

‘I thought we agreed on three o’clock!’

‘That was for the thing we took out of the club. I may as well take the DVD now, as I’m here.’

‘You don’t change, do you? You’re still a chancer. Wait here.’

He was gone for ten minutes, and while she waited Gwen read through the various Health and Safety bulletins that were pinned to the dividing boards. When Mitch returned, he was empty-handed.

‘I’ve set it up in the audio-visual suite. You can watch through it once, then take a copy with you. And you’ll have to sign for it.’

‘OK.’ The AV suite in the police station was high-quality: she would be able to zoom in on images, enhance details, and do most of the tricks that she could do back at Torchwood, with the added benefits that she’d get a little privacy — which was sorely lacking in the Hub — and foster a little more trust between her and her former colleagues in the police.

The AV suite was just a darkened office with a widescreen LCD TV and a rack containing various bits of video equipment: a region-free DVD player, VHS, Betamax and U-matic recorders, a tape recorder and a CD deck, and even a laserdisc player for some bizarre reason. The lads probably thought it took LPs. The idea was that it should be able to replay any recordable media the police took in as evidence, although Gwen remembered them once being foxed by an archive of illegal phone intercepts made, for reasons known only to the suspect, on 8-track tape.

The DVD was sitting on top of the rack, a silver disc in an unlabelled black box. She slipped it into the machine and called up thumbnails of the eight chapters it contained. The disc had been pre-edited by Mitch or his boys: one chapter for the pictures from each camera that had caught the incident as it swung back or forth. It took her forty minutes to go through every chapter twice, at the end of which she knew three things.

It was Craig Sutherland who had brought the device along to the club.

He was demonstrating it to his friend Rick by pointing it at something or someone out of the camera’s field of view.

And, seconds after Craig had demonstrated it, Rick had smashed a beer bottle on the nearest table and lashed out at a passing youth, slicing his face from eye to chin, leaving a gaping, bloody gash, horrifying even on the grainy video footage.

The rest was tragic and inevitable. The youth’s friends weighed in, arms rose and fell, blood spattered the nearby tables and walls. Gwen timed the action: from beginning to end, it took twenty-three seconds. It was a Grand Guignol of unimaginable savagery from kids, just kids, who had been talking and drinking peacefully just a few moments before.

It wasn’t her job. Not technically. It was up to the police to investigate the deaths, ascribe guilt and innocence and close the case. She didn’t live in that world any more.

But it was clear from the video footage that nobody else was involved. It was the closest thing to an open and shut case she’d seen for a long time, except for motive. And motive would get lost along the way. The deaths would be blamed on drugs, or cults, or gangs, or something. Once the police knew they weren’t looking for anyone else, they would wind the investigation down. Only Torchwood would know that the entire event, all five deaths, were due to kids using, or misusing, a piece of alien technology.

Toshiko was down on the firing range.

It was a darkened room, about fifty feet long and thirty wide, starkly illuminated by striplights suspended from an arched ceiling of old red bricks. A flat counter ran across the room at waist height, ten feet from the nearest wall. Partitions divided the bench into sections at which the Torchwood team would stand when they were conducting their regular firearms training, or when one of them was testing some suspected alien weapon they had found. On the other side the room was empty. The far wall contained a set of Weevil-shaped targets, some singed by laser fire and proton blasts, one still soggy from the time Owen had fired an alien fire extinguisher at it by mistake.

Toshiko was alone in the firing range. Alone, apart from two white mice.

One of the mice was in a small perspex cage on the bench, just in front of Toshiko. It was cleaning its whiskers with almost obsessive care. The other one was in another small perspex cage on a table in front of one of the distant targets. It was running up and down, sniffing at the corners and seams of its cage, stretching up to check the holes in the top.

Also on the bench, clamped in place so its longitudinal axis pointed towards each of the mice, was the lavender-coloured alien device.

Toshiko had two video cameras, one on each side of the room, recording her every move. One was set for long shot, the other for zoom. Jack wouldn’t miss anything… in case her experiment went wrong.

Somewhere in the Archive, there was a section devoted to the records left behind by other Torchwood members; ones who had been carrying out experiments, just as Toshiko was. Ianto had showed her where it was, once upon a time. Videos. Photographs. An ancient daguerreotype. And one scratchy old wax cylinder that, Ianto told her, contained a man’s voice talking very calmly up to the point when he suddenly let out the most God-awful scream that Ianto had ever heard.

Toshiko had no intention of only being remembered for the record of an experiment gone wrong. And even if she was, she wouldn’t be remembered for a scream. She would be remembered for the longest, loudest, most unexpected stream of profanities ever recorded by Torchwood.

Using a laser pointer, she lined the alien device up carefully with the two mice: one just a few inches away, the other across the room. She was pretty sure that she had the thing aimed the right way: the overlaid images she had taken of the inside were ambiguous, but she had enough experience of analysing alien technology to know the difference between a transmitter and a receiver, no matter how many light years away they had been fabricated.

The mouse in the far cage was starving. Toshiko hadn’t fed it for several hours, and she could tell by the way it was climbing the sides of the cage that it was desperate for food.

‘I’m probably going to regret asking this,’ a voice said from the doorway, ‘because when I ask similar questions of Owen I get some rather disturbing answers, but what are you doing in here with two white mice and an alien device?’

Toshiko looked around. Ianto was standing in the doorway.

‘I’m trying to confirm a theory,’ she said. ‘I think this is an emotional amplifier. I think it can actually transmit emotions over long distances.’

‘And you’re trying this out with mice, which are not, as far as I know, renowned for their emotions.’

Toshiko smiled. ‘Hunger is an emotion,’ she said.

Ianto entered the room and glanced at her experimental set-up. ‘So one of these mice is hungry, and the other one isn’t? And you want to see if you can project the hunger from one to the other?’ He raised his eyebrows, looking at the small plate Toshiko had put to one side. ‘Left to myself, I would have picked cheese. I notice you’ve gone for the rather more unusual chocolate-smeared-with-peanut-butter option.’

‘I’ve worked with mice long enough to know that cheese is a cliché born of old Tom and Jerry cartoons,’ she replied.’ ‘If you really want to tickle a rodent’s taste buds, you want peanut butter and chocolate.’

The mouse on the bench beside her wasn’t paying much attention. It had spent the past hour gorging itself on food. Now it just wanted to clean itself up and sleep it off.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Everything is set up.’ She took a last look at the video cameras, to check the right lights were on, and then moved across to the device.

‘Based on the interior structure,’ she said to Ianto, ‘the button that activates the device is here.’ She indicated a wider section in one of the raised ribbons that criss-crossed the device. ‘In fact, there are two buttons: one to activate the power and a separate one to operate the receiver and transmitter combination, placed far enough apart that a careless finger can’t accidentally touch them both together. It has to be deliberate — first one button, then the other, and probably within a set period of time.’

Toshiko picked up the piece of peanut butter-smeared chocolate and slipped it through a hole in the top of the nearest perspex cage. It turned as it fell, landing sticky side down. The mouse in the cage glanced at it incuriously, and went back to cleaning its whiskers.

Toshiko pressed the first button on the device, and then the second one.

The ribbons along the side of the device glowed with a subtle apricot colour. Toshiko stepped backwards so that the video cameras could get a better view.

The mouse in the container on the far side of the firing range didn’t react. It kept on climbing the sides of its cage, desperate to get at the food and satisfy its hunger. The nearest mouse, however, sat bolt upright, ears pricked, whiskers pointing forward eagerly. A sudden blur of motion and it was on the chocolate, tearing at it with tiny teeth, turning it over and over with its paws, wolfing down big chunks of the peanut butter. It was acting as if it was starving, as if it hadn’t eaten for hours.

Toshiko reached out to touch the power buttons again. The apricot glow faded away.

The mouse rocked back from the chocolate. It brought its paws up in front of its tiny nose in an almost comical double-take, seemingly surprised at the peanut butter that was smeared across them. Convulsively it began cleaning its whiskers all over again. The chocolate lay, ignored, where it had fallen.

‘Point definitively proven’, Ianto said, impressed.

The area was mostly office blocks with wide glass frontages and lobbies that were all rose marble and lush tropical plants. Few cars passed by, and those that did were either chauffeur-driven, high-end hire cars or lost. No bus routes came that way: there was too much risk of hoi polloi getting in. Any old Cardiff pubs that had survived the blitzing and rebuilding of the area had been gentrified into wine bars or gastropubs catering for the office workers of a lunchtime. No chance of an eighty-year-old bloke with his dog nursing a pint of mild and bitter all night while watching a game of darts, Rhys guessed. The entire place was probably like a ghost town come nine o’clock.

A board in the lobby of the block that Rhys had entered contained a list of all the companies that occupied the offices. Half of the block appeared to be empty: an indication of the way businesses were being priced out of Cardiff by increasing rents.

A uniformed man, sitting at a rose marble desk that seemed to have been extruded from the ground rather than carried in and placed there, was giving him a curious stare. Rhys scanned the list, looking for one name in particular.

Each floor seemed to be devoted to a different company: Tolladay Holdings, Sutherland amp; Rhodes International, McGilvray Research and Development… collisions of surnames and generic phrases that didn’t tell you much about what the companies did. There were probably people working for them who weren’t entirely sure either.

And there it was. The Scotus Clinic. Twelfth floor.

Rhys took a deep breath. This was it. Once he booked in at the security desk, there was no going back.

He wanted Gwen to notice him again and, if Lucy’s story of extraordinary weight loss was anything to go by, then this was the way to do it.

Nodding to the guard, he walked into the elevator and pressed the button for the twelfth floor.

He could do this.

He knew he had it in him.