SEVEN
The alley beside the Mughal Dynasty smelled of exhaust fumes and cooked garlic on a Monday morning. The sky was spitting gobs of rain and, from outside the restaurant, Shiznay could hear the shouts of the delivery driver from the meat packers.
She was wearing a jogging suit, her hair tied back, and was lugging four tied-up sacks full of kitchen waste from the Sunday buffet (‘two for the price of one!’).
Shiznay opened the lid of the galvanised dumpster. She heard a scurrying, a settling, and braced herself for the rats that often popped up out of the slurry. Kamil ought to have been doing this drudge work, but Kamil had been out with his mates the previous night, and had greeted their mother’s calls with groans and rebukes. ‘Shiz, Shizzy, be my good daughter and take out the rubbish.’
And she was, always, a good daughter.
She threw the bags of rubbish into the dumpster, swinging from the waist. She heard a stirring, and looked for something to flip the lid shut without having to get too close.
The noise wasn’t a rat. It was coming from behind the dumpster.
Mr Dine unfolded himself and stood up in the light. He blinked at Shiznay.
She stared at him. ‘You,’ she said, ‘should go away.’
‘Shiznay,’ he said, focusing on her. ‘I… I’m sorry, I-’
‘You should go away, right now! You’re not welcome here!’
Mr Dine breathed in and exhaled slowly.
‘Were you… sleeping behind there?’ she asked. ‘Did you sleep there last night?’
He shrugged. ‘I crashed.’
She said nothing, just stared at him.
He looked back. ‘I wanted to come back, Shiznay. To apologise. Is your father all right? I have a horrible feeling I might have hurt him the other day.’
‘He’s fine. But he doesn’t want to see you around here any more.’
Dine nodded, understanding. ‘Of course. I can appreciate why he feels that way.’ He took something out of his jacket and held it out to her. ‘I left without payment transaction. I wanted to repair that error. I trust this will be adequate.’
‘I don’t want any trouble. Just go. Go.’
‘Please take this, Shiznay, and give it to your father, with my solemn apologies.’
He stank. He’d been sleeping in the dumpster, by the smell of it. Reluctantly, she put out her hands, expecting a few crumpled notes.
He put rocks in her hands instead. Grit, more like. She looked down. ‘What is…?’
Diamonds. Eighteen rough-cut diamonds. Or specks of broken glass, but she was somehow sure they were actual diamonds.
‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked.
‘A customer.’
‘I can’t take these.’
‘Why not? Surely they sufficiently reimburse your restaurant for the meal I ran out on?’
‘I don’t know where you got them from. Are they dodgy?’
‘Dodgy?’
‘You know, shonky?’
‘You have used two words I don’t know.’
‘Dodgy? Shonky? How the hell do you not know words like that?’
‘I’m not from around here.’
‘That much is certain. Where the hell did you get a handful of diamonds? You pick them up off the street, did you?’
He looked blank for a moment. ‘I found them in the waste unit.’
‘Right.’
‘A pencil. A broken pencil. Just a stub. One of yours I think. The kind you write down orders with, certainly. It was simply a matter of graphite compression.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing illegal was done. I performed the compression manually.’
‘You what?’
‘It was a simple action.’
Shiznay stared at him. ‘Were you sleeping there all night?’
Mr Dine smiled. ‘From time to time, I am suddenly alerted to action. I usually have little warning, and the priority takes over. I am invested. I can’t argue with it. The calorific cost of alert is huge. I expend at a high level, and then crash rapidly. It usually turns out to be a false alarm.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘I know. Please accept the payment. And please pass on my abject apologies to your father. My intention was not to hurt him. Alert protocols had taken over. The Principal appeared to be in danger. I have no choice but to act when that happens.’
‘Mr Dine, I-’
‘One last thing, Shiznay. Close your eyes.’
She closed her eyes, and heard a slight, whooshing sound. When she opened her eyes again, he had vanished. Which was, of course, impossible, given the geography of the alley.
Unless he had gone…
Shiznay Uhma looked up at the sky, into the sporadic rain.
‘Come back when you want,’ she said.
A fine Edwardian house on a quiet residential street in Pontcanna. A black SUV, the automotive equivalent of mirror shades, sitting outside under the council-tended elms.
This was not amateur. Gwen was quietly delighted at that part. Not so overjoyed about the mucus.
The Droon were migratory, and sometimes came to Cardiff the way that these things did. According to conversations, operational post-mortems, Torchwood had dealt with the Droon eleven times since Jack had taken charge. Three of those occasions had been since Gwen had joined the team. They’d had practice.
Mr and Mrs Peeters lived in that fine Edwardian house on that quiet residential road. They’d lived there for twenty-six years. Mr Peeters was a retired history teacher, and his wife still taught piano privately. The Droon lived inside Mr and Mrs Peeters. They’d lived there for eight months.
James and Toshiko had gone around the back of the house. Gwen and Jack had approached the front door. Owen watched the side gate by the neatly maintained garage. They had brought the essential kit: audio paddles, tongs, Loctite baggies, pac-a-macs, surgical gloves, wet-wipes, tight-res scanners and carpet cleaner.
The thing with the Droon was that they were generally harmless. On arrival, they took up residence somewhere warm and moist, like a sinus passage, and stayed there, in a kind of contented fugue state. The worst harm they ever did was to trigger mild, cold-like symptoms.
Unless they hatched.
Mostly, they went away again without hatching after a few months. Just went away, or simply died and were ejected, into a Kleenex or during a sneeze, without their place of residence ever knowing about it. It was unnecessarily difficult and risky to try to remove them in their fugue state: better by far, for the health of the host, to allow them go to away of their own accord.
But, one time in ten, they pupated and advanced to the next phase of their haphazard, incomprehensible life cycle. That one time in ten required swift reaction. Fighter Command.
Sudden elevations in alpha-wave patterns were a reliable overture to hatching. As soon as the Peeters had been identified as Droon carriers, Toshiko and Owen had snuck into their house one afternoon and wired it with pattern monitors.
‘Spike’s increasing,’ Owen said, checking his compact scanner. His Bluetooth carried his words to the others.
Jack rang the bell.
