Jack laughed. ‘Bring the results to the Boardroom in an hour.’ He turned his back on Owen as he left the area. ‘Or sooner if you run out of lives.’
The walk in from Riverside normally took less than half an hour. But today, there were repeated delays. The night-time thunderstorm had not eased off so, after kissing Rhys goodbye over his cornflakes, Gwen grabbed a taxi outside their flat in the hope of staying dry. A two-mile walk turned into a five-mile drive, but she was held up as even the normally light Sunday morning traffic ground to a halt along the drenched Penarth Road. Finally, she stood for a few moments on the paving stone by the stainless-steel water tower, waiting to descend into the Hub. Through the rain, she studied the armadillo shape of the Millennium Centre. ‘
Jack waved away her apologies for lateness as she entered the Boardroom, and then indicated her seat. Toshiko returned to studying her laptop, where she was making notes in one window, studying some calculations in another, and displaying live video feeds in two more.
Owen stared at Gwen from where he stood at the plasma screen, bristling with ill-concealed irritation at having his presentation interrupted.
‘Death rejoices,’ Jack said. ‘Why was he so happy about it?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Gwen said.
‘It’s what you see in some mortuaries,’ Owen told her. ‘
‘Only this guy…’ Jack’s casual gesture encompassed several images of the dead Wildman before them. ‘… he didn’t look worried about dying at all, last I saw of him.’
‘He changed his mind about that, after the first fifty feet,’ observed Owen.
Gwen frowned at this. ‘Well, who really wants to die, eh? Like that programme about smoking last night on Channel 4, eh Tosh?’
Toshiko didn’t look up from her laptop computer. ‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t watch TV.’
‘No TV at night?’ Gwen affected astonishment. ‘God, I don’t know what me and Rhys would do without watching telly.’
‘Talk to each other, maybe,’ suggested Toshiko.
Owen coughed. ‘Shall I start this all over again, then?’ He was asking Gwen, rather than Jack. Jack was just smiling, amused by Owen’s reaction.
‘I’ll catch up,’ Gwen reassured him. Owen was looking pretty rough this morning. She’d seen him roll into the Hub before, looking like he’d slept in his clothes, lost his razor, and come straight in without changing. But this morning the circles under his eyes were almost as dark as the stubble on his chin. At least he looked a bit better than Wildman’s corpse in the autopsy pictures.
It was only a few months now since Gwen had seen her first autopsy. She’d never had reason to attend one as a police officer, and she’d always dreaded the day that she’d have to. She’d heard the stories of strapping lads from her station who’d collapsed onto the scrubbed mortuary floor on first witnessing the clinical dissection of a dead body. Lads like Jimmy Mitchell, throwing up their canteen lunch. So her first autopsy had been here at the Hub, when she’d watched Owen dissect a woman of sixty-five who’d managed to get on the wrong side of a Weevil.
Owen had delighted in making Gwen help him, testing the new girl, trying to make her collapse or weep or throw up or just run from the mortuary. She’d determinedly refused to give him that pleasure. She’d approached the whole thing with the detachment she brought to bear when examining a scene of crime. Observing the hanging scale for weighing removed organs, with a round clock-face marked off in kilos and a stainless-steel pan underneath — that was like the one she weighed her fruit in at Tesco. A Bunsen burner on a counter was the same as she’d used at school. The severed grey remains of brain, heart, bowels in jars around the room were harder to dismiss. OK, they were like the specimens in GCSE Biology. She had survived the ordeal and been pleased by her own calmness and by Owen’s obvious disappointment.
That night, back home, when the normality of the sofa and the chicken chow mein and
That was then. Now, she was hardened to it. Or was she simply harder?
‘I used that Bekaran deep-tissue scanner for some of these,’ Owen was explaining, ‘so I could get some initial snaps without any invasive procedures.’ The images were displayed on the wall screen, bright red and cream images of flesh and blood and bone. ‘Amazing, innit? It’s like it peels away the outer layers, or makes them invisible, or something.’
Toshiko looked up idly from her laptop screen. ‘So why bother with the autopsy, then? Even without that, you’ve got MRI scans, ultrasound, nuclear medicine, molecular testing… It’s not hard to work out how he died, is it? His head hit the pavement at thirty miles an hour. Case closed.’
‘Wait and see,’ Owen admonished her.
He ran through the images on the display. Many of the pictures showed Wildman’s corpse with its arms spread, skin flayed back, the chest exposed and the abdomen open. The traditional Y-shaped incision had been made from shoulders to mid-chest and on down to the pubic region. Wildman’s head had struck the bus, and then he had landed on his front. His face was smashed into an unrecognisable pulp, even after it had been cleaned up. Owen explained that he’d considered removing the brain through the big hole in the front of the skull, rather than the more conventional second incision across the head just below and behind the ears. ‘He’s not gonna end up in an open casket, that’s for damned sure,’ agreed Jack.
There were more pictures. Owen had cut the cartilages to separate the ribs from the breastbone. ‘They were smashed up on landing,’ he explained, ‘and when I entered the abdominal cavity you could see that the large intestine had been lacerated by a penetrating injury sustained on impact. So freeing up the intestine took some time. Nothing of great interest for most of the organs. No bacteria in the blood. No interesting results from the bile and urine analysis. Non-smoker, slightly enlarged liver suggests he enjoyed a drink. No indication of drug use, prescription medicines or poisons.’
Jack drummed on the table. ‘You’re saving up the best bits for last, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah,’ said Owen with relish. He put up some new images. ‘Examination of the oesophagus, stomach, pancreas, duodenum, and spleen. Non-human elements there…’
‘That creature that he threw up at Jack,’ interrupted Gwen.
‘Genius,’ said Owen laconically, and continued as if nothing had been said. ‘There’s also an alien device inserted in his spine. Attached to the spinal column, actually, quite near the top. And here it is.’
He produced the thing with a flourish. It was spherical, about the size of a large marble, but with a dull chrome finish. There were three short spiked attachments to one side of it, which Gwen assumed were how it had been fixed in place. Toshiko took it from Owen, and placed it into a small black container about the size of a box of matches. She that to her laptop, and started to scan its contents. ‘Is that round thing what killed Wildman, then?’
Owen rolled his eyes. ‘He died of concrete poisoning. What do you think killed him?’ To make his point, he flashed back to a SOC picture that showed the mangled remains of Wildman, sprawled in the street. ‘Technically, you know, we’d call that a depressed skull fracture and cerebral bleeding.’
‘What about that stuff you were saying yesterday about the spinal fluid?’
Owen flicked back to his notes. ‘Confirmed what you thought, Jack. The blood and skull fragments and brain fluid were from three different DNA sources, including that smelly bag of shit we found yesterday.’
Gwen stiffened in her chair, and felt her face flush with anger again. ‘That bag of shit was a person.’
‘Not any more,’ Owen replied.
‘All right,’ interrupted Jack. ‘Good work on the autopsies, Owen. Tosh, what have you got?’
