Peter Anghelides - Another Life

‘That’s OK, Bobbie.’ Megan switched off the ECG monitor and the alarm stopped at once. ‘Here, sort out her drips.’

‘So,’ said Sandra brightly, ‘how long will it take to get discharged from here?’

‘How long is a piece of red tape?’ smiled the young nurse.

Now that Sandra had stood up, she was pressing her forehead gently with one hand. Megan moved to the door. ‘I’ll sort out some portable analgesia.’

Sandra flexed her arm where the nurse had removed the saline drip and attached a plaster in the crook of her elbow. ‘It may just be that I need a drink, and I haven’t eaten for a while. Owen, can you get my discharge papers sorted out while I get dressed here? I’ll come and meet you out at reception.’

A soldier who protected her modesty, thought Owen. But he just said: ‘Sure.’

‘And I am absolutely famished,’ Sandra told him as he was leaving the room. ‘But don’t worry. While you’re gone, I’m sure Nurse Nottingham here can help me get a bite to eat.’

There was no sign of the dead policeman outside Wildman’s apartment building in Splott. The battering rain had scoured the pavement clean. Even the shrubs where the body had sprawled were flattened by the torrent from the broken gutter.

A half-hearted effort had been made by one of the residents to prop the front doors shut. It wasn’t as if they’d be able to get a carpenter out to effect an urgent repair; there were quite enough other emergencies to attend to as the typhoon blew through the city. Only the two hallway tables and a couple of plastic brooms were holding the doors in place, and Jack was able to force them aside with no difficulty. The crash and clatter of falling furniture was masked by the howl of the wind.

Jack had brought a laser cutter and an axe. Up in Wildman’s apartment, he pulled all of the furniture towards the centre of the room, and tossed pictures and wall hangings on top of them, so that he could methodically test the cavity walls. Where he found that the plasterboard sounded hollow, he applied the laser cutter to slice a hole through it.

Within half an hour, there were scorched gaps in every wall and in the backs of all the fitted cupboards. There was no sign of any lead boxes. A similar search of the small gap under the floorboards yielded nothing either.

By the time he had ransacked the small attic space, he was covered in cobwebs and plaster dust. He’d found boxes of musty novels in damp cardboard boxes, battered wicker baskets and Christmas decorations in supermarket shopping bags. But there was nothing that could contain the missing nuclear materials.

The last thing he did was examine the bathroom. The starfish creature had broken up into decomposed chunks of lumpy grey flesh, so that the bath was like a huge bowl of putrid mushroom soup. By poking at the plughole with the toilet brush he was able to drain most of the malodorous liquid, and satisfy himself that there was nothing concealed below the water line. The pungent stink of dead fish made him retch, even when he tried to breathe only through his mouth. He felt like the stench was overwhelming him, drowning him, and he was hugely relieved to finally abandon the search and close the bathroom door on the whole nauseating spectacle.

Jack sat amid the piled furniture in the middle of the living area. No nuclear materials here. Could Applegate have smuggled them out already, when they were last here? The Geiger counters hadn’t recorded anything, but she’d been wearing a long coat and perhaps that had concealed a smaller lead-lined carrier. So, where could Applegate be now? Alone and wounded. Alone and wounded. He pondered this like a mantra, before deciding to call Toshiko at the Hub.

The call connected on the second attempt. Toshiko told him that she and Gwen were already mobile, and were en route for the Bay in Gwen’s car.

‘Any news from Owen?’ Jack asked her. The signal was poor, and the line intermittent, so they both found they were shouting to make themselves understood. ‘Has he called in?’

‘He may have tried,’ crackled Toshiko’s voice from the mobile. ‘But in these conditions, who can tell?’ There was buzzing interruption and Jack had to get her to repeat what she’d said. ‘I had an idea about checking his mobile phone records. Obviously we’re piggybacking our own system securely on the service providers, and none of them log our calls. But I was able to…’

‘Yeah, OK Tosh,’ said Jack. ‘Half of that’s getting lost in the background noise, and the other half is leaking out of my brain. What have you found?’

There was a pause. Jack wondered whether the line had dropped or Toshiko was in a huff. Eventually she said, ‘Owen received a call last night from a Megan Tegg. She’s a Senior House Officer at the Cardiff Royal Infirmary. And a quick cross-reference shows she and Owen were at university together in London.’

‘Good work, Tosh. I can look into that once I’ve tracked down Applegate. Thanks. Catch you later.’

Why was a doctor at the hospital contacting Owen on his Torchwood mobile? How could she know his number?

Jack sat for a while, surveying the wreckage of Wildman’s apartment.

Applegate was wounded and alone.

Wounded and alone.

Of course. Where would a woman with a gunshot wound go for emergency treatment?

He barrelled down the stairs three at a time, out of the building through the torrent of rain. The SUV’s engine revved and roared as Jack steered the car into the street and onwards towards Cardiff Royal Infirmary.

The Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve was well-named today, decided Owen. The wild storm seemed to rattle the whole frame of Megan’s rusty old Skoda, and the windscreen wipers struggled to clear the water to let them see out. It was no time to go sightseeing, thought Owen sourly. Though he doubted that Sandra was going to be showing them much in the way of wildlife, because the animals had more sense than humans and would either have fled or be cowering in shelter somewhere.

He and an ex had been out here to the Reserve one weekend, and she’d been very excited at the prospect of seeing teal ducks and tufted lapwings and long-beaked snipe. At the time, Owen had been thinking more about the chicken he’d put in the oven for them to eat when they got back home.

Megan drove them out to the north-western shore of Cardiff Bay, between the stylish frame of St David’s Hotel and the outlet of the River Taff. She was following directions from Sandra, who was hunched in the back. Owen tried to engage her in conversation, asking her how she’d been getting on since discovering that Wildman and Bee had died, and the circumstances in which she’d heard the news. But Sandra was too busy giving directions from the back seat, staring out of the car window and trying to make out landmarks made strange by the rain and the gloomy afternoon light.

Owen soon found himself distracted by Megan’s hesitant driving. He hated being a passenger, and fidgeted in the front seat throughout the journey. His feet gave away his impatience as he involuntarily pressed a non-existent accelerator in the passenger footwell, or used an imaginary brake when Megan seemed not to notice some obstruction in the road. He had already regretted letting her drive him to the hospital earlier, eventually accepting with bad grace that her staff pass for the car park was for her Skoda and not his car. He imagined that his Boxter would now be up on bricks outside Megan’s place. He tried to reassure himself that maybe it would be stolen outright, and he could use the insurance money towards that Honda S2000 GT he’d been eyeing up. Monocoque X-bone frame just like a Formula One car, two-litre VTEC engine…

Megan interrupted his thoughts as she slewed the Skoda to a halt and pulled the handbrake into position with a ratcheting noise that made his teeth grind.