Toshiko smiled. ‘Search results are coming through.’ She touched her keyboard and her screen replaced Owen’s on the huge plasma display on the wall.
Owen sat down and stared at the screen with envious eyes. ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘She gets the jobs that take her a couple of minutes and then this whizz-bang technology does the grunt work for her while she sits back and does her nails. Why do I get all the jobs that mean spending two hours up to me elbows in someone else’s cold dead guts?’
Toshiko patted his arm on the table to make him shut up. ‘It’ll take a while, because it has to do a content search on multimedia databases around the UK. Oh, and Jack, I had no luck with that search you asked about yesterday. No UK hospital examinations or autopsies contain info about binary vascular system. Negative for overseas hospitals too. I did the last three years, like you suggested. Shall I extend to five?’
Jack shook his head. ‘Never mind. Stay focused on the current problem.’ But Gwen could see Jack was trying to hide his disappointment. That wasn’t like him, he preferred to encourage and support his team. ‘What else have you got?’
‘I checked out the security reports from the place Wildman worked, the Blaidd Drwg nuclear facility. Do you think it’s too much of a coincidence that a number of their new, experimental nuclear power packs have gone missing?’
Jack’s eyes widened. ‘Didn’t see that on the evening news.’
‘Well, it’s not something they’ve made public, obviously,’ admitted Toshiko. ‘I wonder what…’
Her voiced trailed off as an extraordinary figure entered the room. The inflated white suit and cumbersome cylindrical helmet made it difficult for him to get through the doorframe. When he managed this small feat, he waddled across the meeting room towards them. Gwen could hear his breath hissing through a speaker to one side of the helmet. It took her a moment to see through the visor that it was Ianto.
‘It’s the Michelin Man!’ laughed Owen.
Jack seemed unsurprised by the new arrival. ‘The cut of that suit does nothing for you. It doesn’t even look comfortable.’
‘It’s comfortably protecting my testicles,’ responded Ianto’s voice from the speaker.
Jack considered this unexpected news. ‘I could talk to you about your testicles all day, Ianto,’ he said. ‘But I imagine you have something even more important to tell us.’
The helmet speaker coughed apologetically. Ianto brandished a Geiger counter at them. It was already clicking alarmingly. Gwen wondered fleetingly about where she could go to escape the radiation. But what was the source?
‘I took the liberty of scanning the corpses in the mortuary,’ Ianto began. ‘And I regret to say that one of them is highly radioactive.’
‘OK,’ said Jack calmly. ‘Not too much of a coincidence after all, Tosh.’
Ianto was quickly scanning them each in turn. The ratcheting sound of the Geiger counter didn’t increase when it ran over Jack or Toshiko. It stayed the same when Ianto motioned it against Gwen, too, and she released a rush of air from her lungs that she hadn’t consciously been holding. She stepped out of the way to let Ianto waddle further into the room alongside the table.
The Geiger counter crackled and spat violently when Ianto placed it against Owen. From the look on his face, Owen wasn’t entirely surprised. ‘Up to me elbows in the corpse,’ he shrugged. ‘For two hours. What did you expect?’
‘The rest of you are within safe limits,’ Ianto confirmed.
Gwen was faintly ashamed to discover that she’d unconsciously positioned herself at the end of the table, as far away from Owen as possible. Toshiko bumped up close to her, she noticed. Owen glared at them accusingly from the other side of the room. But where had Jack gone?
Ianto was still explaining. ‘I’m afraid that Owen’s close proximity to the irradiated cadaver means that he will need decontaminating.’
Jack reappeared through the door. He carried a wooden box, teak with brass hinges and an elaborate clasp. He placed it on the table, unfastened the clasp, and from the velvet-lined interior of the box withdrew what looked like a squat loofah.
Owen eyed this novel new item. ‘If you think I’m going to scrub it all off with that…’
Jack held out the loofah, and waggled it at Owen until he took it from him. ‘This will soak up six types of radiation.’
‘Six?’ Owen looked impressed. ‘I can only remember three types.’
‘Well, I got a deal on that thing,’ Jack explained.
Owen was considering the radiation sponge more closely. He was starting to look less enthusiastic. ‘This is it? Shall I just stare at it until the vomiting and intestinal bleeding starts, or should I wait until all my hair’s dropped out?’
Jack gave Owen one of his disconcerting grins. ‘That thing is so effective, I have to store it in this lead-lined box most of the time. Keep it with you, probably for the rest of the day.’ He took the Geiger counter off Ianto, and handed it to Owen. ‘You should stay in the Hub until the rem count for your absorbed dose gets down to here…’ Jack indicated a reading on the counter. It looked as though Owen was going to complain bitterly about this, but Jack quashed his unspoken protest with a look. ‘Tosh, you can keep him company while you complete the search for that thing in Wildman’s spine. Gwen, you’re coming with me to search Wildman’s apartment for the source of this radiation. I think we can guess what that is, but if it’s as radioactive as Wildman, we should make it safe. Ah, thank you, Ianto…’
Ianto had brought two more Geiger counters, each the size of pocket calculators. Jack put one in his jacket, and handed the other to Gwen.
Gwen held it at arm’s length across the table, towards Owen. The dial flicked up into the danger zone. ‘You should have said we were going to Wildman’s, Jack. I could have met you there in the first place, saved myself a journey in here.’
‘What?’ asked Jack, leaving the Boardroom and strolling out into the Hub main area. ‘And missed seeing Owen glow in the dark? Not to mention the pleasure of my company?’ He stopped beside the stainless-steel fountain that stood so incongruously in the middle of the area. Jack pressed a button and Gwen could see, far above them, a piston pushing aside a paving stone in the ceiling. It was immediately obvious that the weather had worsened since she’d arrived. A sprinkling of rain started to spatter down on them, and water began to flow over the sides of the hole.
Jack leapt out of the way of the downpour, and immediately closed the gap again. ‘OK, that’s not gonna work for me. Let’s go out through reception.’
TWELVE
You’re not the kind of woman who stands out in a crowd. Not the kind who wants to. Your hair has never been too bright, your shoes have always been sensible, your lipstick was never too vivid.
Even as you ponder this, you can hear your father’s voice commending you on your safe, uncontroversial choices. Science subjects for A level: ‘Quite right, Sandra, none of that arty nonsense for you, you’ll want a career.’ A university close to your parents: ‘So much more financially convenient to live at home, Sandra.’ Regular attendance at church, sitting between your parents, trying to look inconspicuous although you’re excruciatingly aware of your father’s fluting voice rising above the standard murmur of the congregation during the Lord’s Prayer: ‘
Dad’s mantra was that you should get stuck in, and not stick out. And yet his own insistence on being the most conventional, the most ordinary, the most outspokenly moderate man in Lisvane meant that he himself stuck out in the community more than anyone. ‘Don’t embarrass us,’ he’d tell his family at the restaurant or the cinema. He’d rather die than be embarrassed in public.
Two weeks after he died, you abandoned the second year of your Physics course and signed up for the Royal South Regiment. It was only when, one night in bed with Tony Bee, you were discussing your father’s idiosyncrasies that Tony had reminded you of the irony in your regimental motto. ‘
