Andy Lane - Slow Decay

‘It’s their job to be dispassionate,’ Owen said, as reassuringly as he could. ‘They’re all working on this Tapanuli fever outbreak. They can’t afford to get emotionally involved with their patients.’

‘And you?’ She looked down at the ground. ‘Is it your job to get emotionally involved?’

‘It’s not my job,’ he said. ‘It’s just an optional extra.’

‘You’re really kind. I wish — I wish I’d met you before all this.’

Owen grimaced. ‘If you’d met me before all this,’ he said, the words spilling out before he had time to think about what he was saying, ‘then you wouldn’t have liked me.’

‘But I do like you.’

‘There’s a barrier between us.’ He slapped his hand against the glass, making a sound that echoed through the brick arches. Somewhere down the end, the Weevil grunted, surprised. ‘I can’t get to you and you can’t get to me. All we can do is talk.’

‘Don’t remind me,’ she said, with feeling.

‘You don’t understand.’ He closed his eyes, rested his forehead against the glass. ‘Look, if we were in a bar then I’d be all over you like a rash.’

‘Don’t mention rashes.’

‘You know what I mean. You’ve seen guys like me before. Whatever we say, whatever we do, it’s designed to get you into bed. That’s the way it works with me. The only reason I’m talking to you now is because I can’t get to you.’

‘You’re missing the point. You are talking to me. You could have walked away. Like the others.’

‘I know. But I didn’t want you to be scared of what was happening to you. That’s my medical training coming out.’

‘What changed?’

Owen frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You said the reason you didn’t walk away was that you didn’t want me to be scared, not that you don’t want me to be scared. Past tense, not present. So what’s the reason that keeps you here now?’

‘I like you. I like talking to you.’

‘And if we’d been in a bar, and I’d taken you home, then we wouldn’t have talked and you’d never have got to find out that you like talking to me. What does that tell you?’

He sighed. ‘It tells me that I need a break.’

Gwen lay there for a few moments, listening to Lucy’s breath bubbling through her nose. The girl wasn’t dead, and Gwen wasn’t sure whether that was a result or a shame. Part of her wanted to reach out, retrieve her gun and place a couple of rounds through the back of the bitch’s head, just for the sheer cheek of trying to chat up Gwen’s boyfriend, but that was the adrenalin talking.

Eventually, when she had got her breath back enough to talk, she pulled her mobile out of her pocket. Her finger hesitated over the 9 , but reluctantly it moved on to the speed-dial button that got through to Torchwood. In principle, Gwen should notify the police straight away. In practice, what the hell would she tell them? Only four people in Cardiff — probably only four people in the world — could help her now.

Ianto answered the phone.

‘Tell Jack that I’ve got one of these women who attack anything that moves,’ Gwen wheezed. ‘I’m over in Grangetown. Eighty-eight, George Avenue. I need the SUV and restraints.’

‘We’ll be there as soon as we can,’ Ianto said. There seemed to be alarms going off in the background.

‘What’s going on?’ Gwen asked. ‘It’s not fire alarm test day is it?’

‘Some problem in the cells,’ Ianto said. ‘Jack has gone to investigate. I’ll tell him as soon as he gets back.’

Gwen rang off, and pulled herself to a sitting position at the end of the bed. Something intruded in her field of vision; she turned her head to be confronted with a foot belonging to the corpse of Lucy’s boyfriend. Most of the toes were missing: reduced to stumps. She winced. That might have been her.

‘Thank God for high heels,’ she muttered.

She rooted around in her bag until she found two pairs of restraints: braided plastic loops with a ratcheted toggle that could reduce the size of the loops and couldn’t be slid back again. She put one of the restraints on Lucy’s hands, pulled together behind her back, and another pair on her feet. Let her eat her way out of that.

While she waited for the Torchwood team to sort out their emergency and get there, Gwen searched the flat. It seemed to be balanced between chaos and order, with Lucy’s boyfriend presumably leaving mess around him and Lucy trying desperately to clear it up all the time. Part of Gwen’s mind felt sorry for Lucy, trapped in a dead-end relationship in a dead-end area of Cardiff, but the rest of her remembered the way the light had gleamed off Lucy’s incisors as they parted, ready to rip her throat apart.

The cabinets on either side of the bed were obviously his’n’hers. The boyfriend’s one she only gave cursory attention to, but Lucy’s one was more interesting. On top of the various pieces of paper and hairclips in the top drawer was a blister pack, similar to the kind of thing that paracetamol came in but containing only two transparent bubbles. One of the bubbles had a pill in it; the other was empty. Gwen turned the blister pack over. The foil on the other side said nothing about the nature of the drug it contained. Two words were printed on it: the empty bubble was labelled ‘Start’, while the bubble that still contained a pill was labelled ‘Stop’. No ambiguity there, and no need for the kind of triple-folded instruction leaflet that most pharmaceuticals came with these days.

Gwen slipped the pack into her pocket, and kept searching. Underneath where the pills had been was an A5 hardback book covered in a pink material. It said ‘My Diary’ on the front in big, childish letters. Gwen took it out and held it for a moment. Somewhere in those pages were Lucy’s feelings about Rhys. Fantasies, perhaps, of him doing all kinds of things to Lucy that he’d occasionally hinted at doing with Gwen but never followed through on. Gwen’s fingers curled around the edge of the cover. She could read it, while Lucy was still unconscious. There might be clues in there as to what had happened to her. There might be useful information she could take back to Jack.

There might also be descriptions of things that had happened between Lucy and Rhys for real, things that he hadn’t admitted to Gwen.

She threw it back into the drawer. There were some questions it was probably best not to ask, not when things seemed to have improved between them.

Beneath where the diary had been was a flyer advertising a diet clinic: presumably the one that had helped Lucy lose so much weight. Was that what the pills were for? One to start losing weight, the other to stop. Could life really be that simple? No counting of calories, no cutting back on carbohydrates, no tedious exercise? Just two simple pills?

Gwen took another look at the flyer for the diet clinic. It was headed ‘The Scotus Clinic’, and there was a photograph underneath the heading of a thin and youngish man with a short, well-coiffured mass of blondish hair. The blurb underneath was written in short, pithy sentences, asking questions that begged particular answers, like Do you want to lose weight and be the size you deserve to be? and Tired of not getting dates and getting passed over for promotion because of your size?

Looking at the flyer, Gwen began to wonder. Lucy went to a diet clinic, and ended up wanting to eat everything in sight. Had Marianne — the girl they had back at Torchwood — been to the diet clinic too? Was something going on there that needed to be looked at? Jack would probably disagree — if there was no alien context then he was quite prepared to walk away, no matter how many lives had been lost or might still be lost — but Gwen still thought like a policewoman. If the Scotus Clinic was preying on young girls, screwing up their metabolisms with dodgy drugs, then they needed to be called to account. And if Jack wouldn’t get involved then she would do it herself.