Peter Anghelides - Another Life

You can be calm, logical, reasonable, without being unemotional. That was true of your relationship with Tony, as he used to tell you. Now that he is dead, you’ve moved on — literally. And what should be your grief is no longer helpful, no longer appropriate. It’s still there, in the background. A curious feeling, buried deep, sublimated. Unnecessary. Do you really understand it any more? These people have a bewildering array of loose social constructs, half-formed affections, unspoken desires and occasional passions. It’s only since he died that you realise how much Tony Bee loved you. You can examine those feelings dispassionately too — the ache in him when he was away from you, when he surfaced again, when he returned to the Caregan Barracks. Until the newer, primal ache in him had overwhelmed that.

Set that aside, now. You’re here for a reason. Being distracted by those memories is a very human thing to do. And in your current circumstances, you find that amusing.

The key clicks and turns in the lock of Wildman’s apartment, and your search begins.

Jack let Gwen drive. She enjoyed the chance to take the Torchwood SUV out. It was very different to her own Saab. The first time you drove it, you felt like you were steering from the top deck of a bus. You got a sense that the suspension was soft enough to let you mount the pavement and run down a flight of steps without spilling a drop from whatever drink you’d jammed into the passenger-side cup holders. You could probably drive over a crowd of pedestrians and not feel a bump. That was usually worth remembering when she was racing through the city centre, trying to beat the press to some scene or other.

Rain rattled on the SUV’s roof. No matter how fast the windscreen cleared with a contemptuous flick of the wipers, more water immediately smeared their view of the road ahead. It was the middle of Sunday morning, and yet the downpour and the clouds made it seem like dawn was only just breaking. No danger of unwittingly thumping a crowd of pedestrians today, because the streets were almost empty. They would all still be in bed, well out of this lot if they had any sense. That’s where Rhys would be.

Jack had programmed Wildman’s address into the SUV’s direction-finder. Toshiko had designed it as an upgrade to the usual passive satellite positioning. This could use local information about roadworks, police incident reports and judgements about traffic flow from analysis of CCTV images. It offered turn-by-turn directions in an infuriatingly calm schoolmistress voice. Gwen didn’t need her help, and it amused her to take alternatives to the spoken directions, if only to hear it say ‘Recalculating route’ in a reproving tone, and Jack’s accompanying chuckle.

Frequent mind-numbing patrols of the area when she was a police constable had made Gwen an expert in the urban geography here. She turned the vehicle into the next road along from Wildman’s apartment block. The area was a set of parallel roads between the two railway lines, so it was possible to cut across through a walkway, and thus not draw attention to themselves by parking a monster vehicle with blacked out windows slap bang outside their target’s residence.

The SUV easily negotiated the traffic-calming measures that straddled the width of the carriageway. ‘They put these in a couple of years back, after the Wales Rally came through Cardiff.’

‘Was it a rally or an obstacle course?’ asked Jack.

‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Bunch of local kids thought it was all right to run their own version of the rally through these streets. There was this rash of teenage TWoCs.’

‘That’s not what I’d call them.’

‘Taking Without Consent,’ she tutted. ‘Worked out to be cheaper to discourage it. So they put these sleeping policemen here rather than put real policemen on the beat.’

Jack was unbuckling his seat belt as the car came to a halt. ‘Sleeping policemen?’ He followed her pointing finger that indicated the humps in the roadway. ‘Oh, right. Y’know, I kinda like the idea that they actually buried some lazy cop in the tarmac.’

‘Buried in paperwork, more like.’ Gwen reached into the storage compartment, and took out two portable Geiger counters. She handed one to Jack. Then she buttoned her jacket, pulled her collar up tight, and stepped down from the car.

They ran through the hissing rain, managing to avoid the worst of the puddles. Scrawny hedges drooped over the pavement. The overcast sky was dark enough that the automated streetlamps had not been extinguished. A Tesco mini-supermarket smeared a patch of orange light across the cracked paving stones.

Wildman’s apartment was in a three-storey building. Gwen huddled next to Jack under the concrete awning that was failing to provide much shelter from the rain. The unblinking eye of a video camera watched them from above. The main doors were stout, green-painted metal, Chubb-locked, and with artless graffiti scrawled in marker pen. Residents’ names were written, more tidily than the graffiti, on plastic-covered scraps of paper next to illuminated push buttons. One or two had faded to illegibility, but one of them had neatly stencilled capitals in green ink that showed ‘WILDMAN, G’ on the second floor. A video lens peered at them from behind a glass plate.

‘He’s obviously not home.’ Jack stepped back into the rain. He seemed to be squaring himself to barge the door.

‘No!’ snapped Gwen. ‘You’ll wake up the whole neighbourhood.’

‘And your point would be…?’

‘Where are his keys? They must have been on the body.’

‘Oh yeah,’ Jack told her. ‘I’m really gonna slip a handful of irradiated metal into the pocket of my pants.’

‘Well, you can’t go barging in, not round here. You don’t want any fuss, or to draw a crowd. Especially if he’s left a tidy pile of nuclear materials in his kitchenette.’

He gave her a tight smile, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. ‘OK, you’re my local expert. We’ll use ID.’

She shook her head. ‘Not even if we were in uniform. They’re suspicious. There’s curtains twitching across the road already. No! Don’t turn round! Think of it. You wouldn’t want wet bobbies traipsing their flat feet through your hallway. We have to make them want us to come in. So…’

Gwen rummaged in her pockets, but couldn’t remember where she’d left her purse. She held out one wet hand towards him. ‘Lend me a fiver, will you? I’ve got no cash.’

He handed over a crumpled ten pound note. ‘What are you, a member of the Royal Family?’

‘Back in two minutes,’ she promised him. She stared directly into his eyes. ‘Promise you won’t make a scene?’

She ran back down the street, and could hear him shout after her: ‘I expect change!’

The weather was killing business at the Tesco mini-supermarket. The shopkeeper’s badge told Gwen that she was Rasika. And Rasika looked grateful for her first and possibly only visitor of the morning, if surprised at what her customer bought.

Gwen showed Jack the four bags of groceries, holding them up like trophies. ‘OK, press the button for the flat below Wildman’s.’

He considered her shopping. ‘You got hungry?’

‘Six loaves of cheap bread and four jumbo boxes of cornflakes,’ she scowled. ‘Cheap and bulky. Looks like a lot, not too heavy, and cost nearly nothing.’

‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the change.’

‘Press the button, Jack.’

A querulous woman’s voice answered the call. ‘Yes?’

‘Tesco Direct,’ Gwen shouted at the speaker, and held up the shopping bags in front of herself so that the video camera could see them. ‘Bell’s bust for number nine. I could leave this lot on the step, but I’d rather bring it up out of this rain.’