Dan Abnett - Border Princes

‘Bloody hell,’ he muttered, shaking his head. ‘How cowardly… how bloody spineless can you be? Coming in here to pick the place clean while I’m at work. Very classy, that. I’ve known burglars show more-’

‘I don’t want this!’ she protested. ‘Not now. Can’t you grasp that? This is exactly why I dropped in when I thought you’d be out. I don’t want this.’

‘OK. Just so long as you can sort out what you want, we’ll be fine. Just so long as you get what you bloody want-’

‘Rhys!’

He glowered at her.

‘I’m not ready to do this,’ she told him. ‘I’m really sorry this happened today, but I’m not ready to do this yet.’

The kettle began to steam.

‘I gotta go,’ said Gwen.

‘You got a number, then? Somewhere I can reach you if I need to?’

‘You can call me on my mobile.’

‘Apparently, I can’t,’ he said. ‘God knows, I’ve tried.’

‘I’ll answer you, promise I will.’

‘We’ll see.’

She put on her coat and picked up her hold-all. She paused to slide the trinket box back onto its place on the shelf.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you.’

‘Right,’ he nodded. He was staring at the window, not looking at her. The muscles in his jaw were tense.

‘I will. Soon. Soon as I can.’

‘Right.’

‘Take care of yourself, all right?’

‘Yeah. No one else will.’

She walked out and pulled the front door closed behind her.

Rhys sighed, and bowed his head. He turned the kettle off and looked at the front door.

‘Oh, also, I love you,’ he whispered.

She’d parked her car around the corner. Morning traffic hissed by on the damp road: a turquoise Cardiff Bus, a minicab, an Alpha Course transit conveying chattering OAPs to a church lunch, a courier van, a big-boned Chelsea tractor with a tiny mum at the helm. Somewhere a car alarm was whooping, and a crossing signal was pinging. Engines idled. Tail pipes quivered, fuming.

Gwen felt sick and she felt bad and, most of all, she felt wrong.

She got into the black Saab. The windows had steamed up. James was dozing off in the passenger seat.

‘All done?’ he asked, opening his eyes as the door shut.

She pushed her hold-all back over onto the rear seats. It wedged against the head rest. She gave it an angry shove to send it on its way.

‘Gwen? What is it?’

Gwen fumbled with the keys, then sat back. ‘Rhys was there.’

‘Shit. Did he give you a hard time?’

‘No,’ she said, sternly. ‘He’s not like that-’

‘OK, OK. I was just-’

‘Don’t.’

‘Sorry.’

She looked around at him. ‘He was so sad. So messed up.’

‘Gwen…’

‘I did that to him. Me. My fault. I tried to explain why I was there, but it looked bad, you know?’

‘Everything will sort itself out,’ James said.

‘Is that a promise?’

‘Yes it is.’

‘Wish I had your confidence. It’s going to get ugly.’

‘It’ll be fine.’

‘I hate the lying.’

‘So you said.’ James waited a moment. ‘So, did you tell him anything?’

‘Like what?’

James shrugged.

‘No. Nothing about that. It’s too soon.’

‘OK. You’re right. Too soon.’ He looked a little downcast, but right then she didn’t especially care.

He wiped the window with his cuff and looked out. ‘Ianto called.’

‘Did he?’

‘Wondered where I was. Wondered if I knew where you were. Something’s gone off.’

She started the engine. ‘Hub?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said James. ‘I’ve got an address. He told us to meet Jack there.’

She pulled out into the traffic.

Butetown, the old heart of industrial Cardiff, used to run right down to the Docks. It still did, in the opinion of dyed-in-the-wool locals.

But Cardiff was post-industrial now. Chimney soot and coal ash from the steel works no longer occluded the midday sun. Smutty trains no longer clanked in and out along the Taff Vale line. After three billion pounds-worth of facelift, the Docks were no longer called the Docks. They were the Bay, gleaming new and millennial, where suits lunched, and bistros thrived, and a few hundred thousand bought you a penthouse in the Quay developments with views of the Barrage. Those stalwart locals still called it Butetown, though, fighting the onset of a change already done and dusted.

All that remained of Butetown, all that actually perpetuated the name, had coiled up in the heart of the central area and laid down in surrender, a sprawl of brick link tenements and fatigued 1950s high-rises, criss-crossed by the ghost veins of railway embankments, rendered in decaying Victorian stonework.

Shiny black, brooking no objections, the SUV chased up Angelina Street like a slipped greyhound. Terraces swept by, a mosque. Traffic on the road, a street market, shop fronts with battered shutters still closed at mid morning on a Tuesday, like knights in the lists with their visors shut for the tilt.

‘Chapel?’ asked Toshiko for the seventh time.

‘Patience. We’re getting there,’ said Jack.

He turned off into Skean Street, then braked as a refuse lorry blocked the way. He turned his head, resting his left arm across the seat backs, and reversed as far as Livermore, then switched left and then right again. Cobbles bumbled under their tyres.

He drove them down a narrow gulf between old machine shops, and swung out wide in the gravel bed of a dead lot. Fossil cars, up on bricks, gazed at them with rusted eyes.

‘Here?’ asked Toshiko.

Jack pulled the handbrake. ‘Here. What have you got for me?’

She shrugged, and leaned forward, punching up the dashboard displays, working between one body of data and the next with the trackball set into the dash.

‘Nothing?’ she suggested.

‘Go on.’

‘An absence of fact. A lack of data. What do you want me to say?’

‘Exactly that,’ Jack said. ‘There’s nothing here.’

‘So why…?’

‘Nothing at all . You see?’

‘Uh, no?’

‘Not even bricks and ground,’ Jack said softly.

‘Ah,’ said Toshiko. ‘I see now. Hang on. No, I don’t.’

‘Let’s take a walk,’ said Jack.

He got out. She followed him. The slam of her door sent pigeons mobbing up into the rafters of a nearby ruin. The air was wet, suffused with a mineral scent. Bird lime spattered the ground. The overarching iron rafters were black against the plain white sky. They looked like the ribs of a leviathan fish.

Jack popped the SUV’s back hatch. He took a compact scanner out of the equipment boxes and tossed it to her. Toshiko caught it neatly.

‘And this is for?’

‘Keeping tabs on the nothing that still isn’t there.’

Toshiko switched the scanner on. No reading, no bounce, no tone lock.

‘You know why I love working with you, Jack?’ she asked.

‘No?’

‘Me neither. I was hoping you could help me out with that.’

‘Come on,’ he said.

They crossed the weed-infested gravel, and crunched onto a slurry of tiles that had cascaded down from the roof at some point. Cobwebs strung between bent girders encrusted with twinkling dew diamonds from the night’s onslaught. They walked into shadow under what remained of a warehouse roof.

‘What are we looking for?’ Toshiko complained.

‘All in good time. Try appreciating the vernacular architecture,’ Jack said, his voice coming back hollow and echoing. ‘This was the Millner and Peabody Number Three Coal Depot. In 1851 alone, this place factored and then sent out eighteen million tons of coke to fuel the engines of Empire. Doesn’t that just make you crazy?’