Peter Anghelides - Another Life

Owen stood up to look at the screen more closely. ‘Bloody hell! Look at all these Welsh place names.’ He wrinkled his nose at Gwen. ‘Don’t you people use vowels? It’s like the English town planners finished naming all our places, and your lot had to use all the left-over letters in the box.’

‘ Gwirionyn ,’ Gwen told him. ‘As my nan would say.’

‘Bless you,’ retorted Owen. ‘I mean, look at this. How do you even pronounce this one?’

‘That’s Ystradgynlais,’ Gwen said. ‘It’s up north somewhere, I think. How have you got all this, Tosh?’

Toshiko looked pleased to be asked. ‘Cross-match of the DNA analysis with their NHS record.’ She called up another screen of information, this time a map of the whole Cardiff area. There were two clusters of red dots, and one solitary dot at a distance from them. She indicated the largest cluster. ‘As you can see, these are all within easy access of the Blaidd Drwg offices. There’s one isolated similar case out in the Wetlands Nature Reserve, from some days previously. And then there’s a smaller cluster here. The nearest things to that are a tourist centre, an army training camp, and the market town of Cowbridge.’

‘Excellent work, Tosh.’ Jack was clearly pleased. ‘The larger cluster is pretty conclusive: Wildman is our guy.’

Gwen said: ‘Couldn’t someone else have been using his security card to badge in and out? Set him up for this?’

Toshiko shook her head. ‘It was a card-plus-thumbprint system.’

‘He still has both thumbs,’ said Owen. ‘Nobody borrowed one from him.’

‘Wouldn’t matter,’ rejoined Toshiko. ‘Contour of the skin distorts once a digit gets severed. Print would be imperfect.’

Gwen saw Jack smile indulgently at this competitive exchange. ‘OK,’ he said loudly. ‘We need to see if anything ties Wildman in with the other cluster. Mr Harper, what have ya got?’

‘Doctor Harper, if you don’t mind.’ Owen sat up straighter in his chair, as though the teacher had picked him out to answer a particularly tricky question in class. He flipped open the top of his laptop and thumped at the keys to get his information displayed on the plasma screen. He seemed to be directing his explanation at Gwen now. ‘Done some prep work for Wildman’s autopsy. No knife work yet, but a load of scans to be going on with. They show evidence of osseous tissue in the upper gastrointestinal tract, but nothing much beyond the pyloric antrum.’

Gwen was amused to hear Jack and Toshiko both start to fake a coughing attack. Owen scowled at them, and resumed his explanation to Gwen. ‘Or, to put it simply…’

‘He swallowed a whole load of bony bits,’ interjected Jack.

‘Well, yeah,’ said Owen.

‘I’m betting,’ continued Jack, ‘that Wildman’s stomach will contain blood and skull fragments and brain fluid from at least three different DNA sources.’

‘The clue will be what was most recently ingested.’ Owen pummelled some more keys on his computer. Fresh images expanded on the wall display. The photos showed Wildman’s bloody remains, somehow starker and more brutal when laid out on the cold metal of the examination slab. The face was a pinkish-grey mush.

‘I may never eat strawberry yoghurt again,’ Gwen said.

Owen seemed to be enjoying her discomfort. ‘You should see him when I’ve sliced him open. Then we’ll see if his stomach contains DNA evidence from the other vagrant victims. The one’s who were… what was the word again Tosh? Predated.’

Jack leaned forward on the conference table. He poured himself another slug of Ianto’s coffee. ‘Think there’s gonna be a more recent victim’s DNA in Wildman’s stomach. One that isn’t on your chart yet, Tosh. I saw Wildman’s face before he bounced it off that bus. Before he took the drop. Looked to me like spinal fluid all down his clothes. Messy eater.’ He took a big slurp of his coffee. ‘Y’know, the worst thing about being bitten to death like that? It’s not a clean death, because the Welsh have such terrible teeth.’

Gwen defied this slur with a big, insincere smile. ‘Where’s the latest victim?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Dunno. Looked like Wildman had been snacking pretty recently. Probably another vagrant, but in the city centre. Any news on the police frequency, Tosh?’

Toshiko performed a staccato rhythm with the stylus on her PDA. ‘I’ve put a trace on.’

‘A vagrant would be good,’ nodded Owen. ‘No need to provide a cover story for their disappearance.’

His casual tone enraged Gwen. She felt her neck and face flush with anger, and heard her own words almost before she knew she was saying them. ‘Vagrants are people too, Owen.’

‘Hark at her.’

‘Don’t patronise me! For all we know, another poor lad is lying dead in a gutter. Unfound at the moment. Unnoticed, certainly. Real people like you would just walk past him, even when he was alive. Maybe he was selling the Big Issue in town. Or maybe he was just wandering around trying to find somewhere to kip for the night, and the first time it looked like anyone was showing him any attention was when Wildman approached him, and that was the last thing he ever knew.’

‘I’m just saying,’ insisted Owen, ‘it’s not like Tosh is gonna struggle to conceal the death of some chewed up pikey when he turns up in a gutter somewhere in Grangetown.’

Gwen slapped both hands on the table, an alarming sound that echoed off the glass walls of the Boardroom. ‘How can we know what made him come to Cardiff, this poor bastard we’ve not even seen yet? How can we say that his family aren’t somewhere out there, somewhere else in Wales, or further out? Wondering if he’s all right. Not knowing if he’s alive, but praying that he is. Not knowing that he died today.’ She blinked hard, and looked up at the strip lights in the ceiling to stop the tears. She wouldn’t give Owen that satisfaction. ‘Unfound? Unnoticed? Yeah. But unmissed? I don’t think so.’

Owen leaned across the table to her, uncowed. ‘When you’ve been here a while longer, you’ll see it differently. I mean it. I’ll ask you again in a couple of months’ time, you’ll have changed your tune. I mean, I honestly hope I’m wrong about that…’

‘No you don’t,’ Toshiko said quietly.

‘No,’ admitted Owen after barely a pause. ‘I don’t.’

Jack stood up. It was a casual gesture, and he made it look as though he was pulling together their cups and putting them back on the tray. But by doing so, he leaned over the table towards each of them. It was an elegant gesture of control, reasserting his authority. Calming the room.

He smiled across the table at Owen. ‘Good job on the initial scan.’

Toshiko’s PDA interrupted him with a beeping alarm. ‘Search result,’ she said, and put it up on the main screen. ‘Police report that matches our interest profile.’

‘Result indeed,’ Jack observed. ‘They’ve found Wildman’s car. Now where did I put my coat?’ Gwen pointed through the glass door to where she could see it on the railing outside. ‘OK, good, thanks. Tosh, here’s another search I’d like you to run.’ He slipped a folded piece of paper across the table to her. She looked at it briefly, nodded, and put the paper in a pocket alongside her PDA. ‘Owen, let us know what else you find after you’ve opened Wildman up.’

And with this, Jack was off through the Boardroom door, beckoning for Gwen to join him.

She caught up with him at the foot of the spiral staircase. ‘What’s the rush?’

‘The car wasn’t empty,’ he told her as they approached a solitary paving stone that lay incongruously in the floor of the Hub. ‘It pains me to tell you this, Gwen, but I don’t trust your former colleagues to handle this well.’