Peter Anghelides - Another Life

The speaker made the sound of someone clattering a handset back into its cradle. Almost immediately, the door buzzer sounded.

Jack leaned against the green metal. The doors opened into a dingy hallway of grimy linoleum. There were two doors to the left, with two more opposite. A flight of steep steps rose into the darkness further down on the right. The hall was flanked by two scratched side tables, one covered in free newspapers and uncollected mail. Jack scanned the letters but found nothing for Wildman. He took a reading from the Geiger counter, but it ticked softly in the safe zone.

Gwen made her way up the concrete stairs. A detector registered her arrival and activated a bare bulb on the half-landing above. Through the big picture window she saw the rain drumming down on a back yard containing dustbins and a half-filled rusty yellow skip.

By the time she and Jack had reached the top of the next flight of stairs, an old woman had appeared around one of the doors on the landing. She had long, grizzled grey hair and a face to match. Gwen held up the bags and nodded in the direction of the next flight of stairs. ‘Thanks,’ she told the old woman cheerfully.

She looked Jack and Gwen up and down, considering their casual black attire and the water running off them on to the floor. Gwen watched where the drips were falling, and was aware that the gaudy linoleum on this landing outside the old woman’s apartment was scrubbed clean.

‘I can remember,’ replied the old woman in a measured tone, ‘when delivery drivers wore a uniform. But it’s all gone to hell these days, hasn’t it?’ And with this, she retreated into her apartment. Several security chains rattled as she secured them behind the closed door.

Gwen abandoned the four bags of cheap groceries at the top of the stairs, propping the bags against the railings. Jack scanned again for radiation, and was satisfied when he found the area uncontaminated.

Wildman’s apartment was one of two on this second floor. The door to number seven was painted in a cherry red that made a cheerful contrast to the other apartments that they’d seen so far.

‘Yale lock,’ Gwen told Jack. ‘Might be double-locked. But we know he’s not in anyway.’ She kept a look-out, watching for movement up and down the stairs, while Jack attempted to slip the lock.

‘Oh.’

Something had surprised Jack. Gwen looked over to see that he was pocketing his Geiger counter but drawing his revolver from its holster in his great coat. He mouthed ‘Door’s already open’ to her.

She reached for her own concealed weapon. Unlike Jack’s Webley, hers was a standard-issue Torchwood weapon. That meant non-standard anywhere else in the world, because their armoury issue was almost certainly augmented by alien technology. Jack was never particularly keen to explain to her exactly how, and she’d discovered that asking Toshiko about it was like requesting an invitation to a lecture on particle physics.

Jack pushed the apartment door open with his toe, and they both flattened themselves against the wall either side of the outer frame. There was no response from inside. Jack swung around, his legs braced and his Webley held in a double-handed grip.

From inside the apartment came a shrill scream and the sound of glass breaking.

‘All right, ma’am,’ Jack said, and stepped slowly through the doorway. ‘Stay calm. No cause for alarm.’

Gwen followed him into the apartment, noting that Jack did not lower his weapon.

A woman had pressed herself up against the striped wallpaper just inside the main room. Her brown eyes were wide, scared, unblinking. She couldn’t take them off Jack’s revolver. ‘Please don’t shoot,’ she begged in the voice of a schoolgirl, though she must have been in her mid thirties. ‘Please. Don’t hurt me.’

At her feet were fragments of a small, glass-topped table and the ornaments that had stood on it. The woman had overturned them in her fright when she first saw Jack. She was wearing sensible shoes, no tights, just tanned bare skin.

‘Room’s clear.’ Jack raised his voice so that Gwen could hear from her position in the narrow hallway behind him. ‘Stay back for a moment while I sweep the place.’

From her position in the hallway, Gwen could see Jack kick open doors to places off the main room. Bedroom, bathroom, saloon doors through to a kitchen area. Eventually he called to her that the apartment was secure.

Gwen moved into the room and holstered her weapon. The whole room looked like it had last been decorated in the 1970s. The same brown shag pile carpet appeared to have been fitted throughout, trampled to death over many years.

‘It’s OK,’ Gwen reassured the frightened woman. ‘We’re police. Special operations.’ She showed the woman her ID. ‘What’s your name, love?’

The woman seemed to slide down the wall as she relaxed a little. ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘Betty Jenkins.’ She had a South Wales accent. Swansea, maybe.

Jack was openly scanning the room with the Geiger counter. ‘I thought Tosh said Wildman was a sad bachelor with no life?’ He was examining items in the room. A Men’s Health magazine, with a black and white cover of a strapping male model and a headline: ‘Six Simple Steps to a Six-Pack Like His’. Next to it, a thumbed copy of Radio Times from three weeks earlier. On the scratched coffee table was a single dirty coffee mug with a small plate of crumbs beside it. Cushions on the battered settee were all squashed together at one end, as though someone had piled them there when propped up watching the TV. The gas fire’s dusty back-plate suggested it hadn’t been lit for months, an impression confirmed by the positioning of a two-bar electric fire propped on a pile of books and attached to the wall socket by a long extension cable. By the door was a sideboard that must have been the height of fashion forty years ago, its formica top covered in old magazines, junk mail, and a battered letter opener.

Like any newly seen room, it offered a useful insight into its occupier. Gwen sometimes tried to look at things in a similar way when she got home to Rhys and their flat. Whenever she did, though, she just found she got an overpowering urge to tidy up and throw things away.

Wildman’s apartment walls held photo enlargements in A4 clip-frames. Most showed images of colourful tropical fish, clearly focused underwater near a sandy seabed or against the startling grandeur of a coral reef. One showed a trio of people, ready to dive, on a boat that floated in azure water beneath a cloudless blue sky. They were in wetsuits, masked up, thumbs raised, and their brightly coloured scuba gear made them seem as exotic as the fish. On a stand by the window was a rack of barbell weights. The whole apartment was stale, unaired, cold. It had that smell you got on the first day when you returned home from a fortnight’s holiday.

Gwen helped Betty to the nearest armchair, an ugly, oversized thing in green Dralon. The frightened woman sank into it gratefully. She pulled the tails of her navy-coloured coat into her lap, and smoothed it over her knees.

‘I’m Gwen, by the way. Now, what are you doing here, Betty? Do you know Mr Wildman?’

Betty took a deep, shuddering breath in. She seemed terrified still.

‘It’s OK. We’re concerned about Mr Wildman and his whereabouts. We want to help him.’ After a while, Gwen knew, the half-truths and misrepresentations came more easily. Wildman was stone-cold dead, glowing slightly on a slab back in the Hub’s mortuary. But they didn’t know all his movements before this suicide. Perhaps the woman could help. ‘Do you know where he might be, Betty?’

‘He’s in Egypt. Said he was going on a dive with some tour firm in… Dahab? In the Red Sea. I joked with him that he’d never get below the surface, because of all the salt, and he laughed because he said I was mixing it up with the Dead Sea…’ She trailed off, her voice failing. ‘The Dead Sea,’ she repeated, and her liquid brown eyes stared into Gwen’s. ‘Oh God. Tell me he’s all right. He’s not dead, is he? What’s happened to him?’