above. The main doors were stout, green-painted metal, Chubb-locked, and with artless graffiti scrawled in marker pen. Residents’ names were written, more tidily than the graffiti, on plastic-covered scraps of paper next to illuminated push buttons. One or two had faded to illegibility, but one of them had neatly stencilled capitals in green ink that showed ‘WILDMAN, G’ on the second floor. A video lens peered at them from behind a glass plate.
‘He’s obviously not home.’ Jack stepped back into the rain. He seemed to be squaring himself to barge the door.
‘No!’ snapped Gwen. ‘You’ll wake up the whole neighbourhood.’
‘And your point would be…?’
‘Where are his keys? They must have been on the body.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Jack told her. ‘I’m really gonna slip a handful of irradiated metal into the pocket of my pants.’
‘Well, you can’t go barging in, not round here. You don’t want any fuss, or to draw a crowd. Especially if he’s left a tidy pile of nuclear materials in his kitchenette.’
He gave her a tight smile, and reached into the pocket of his jacket. ‘OK, you’re my local expert. We’ll use ID.’
She shook her head. ‘Not even if we were in uniform. They’re suspicious. There’s curtains twitching across the road already. No! Don’t turn round! Think of it. You wouldn’t want wet bobbies traipsing their flat feet through your hallway. We have to make them
Gwen rummaged in her pockets, but couldn’t remember where she’d left her purse. She held out one wet hand towards him. ‘Lend me a fiver, will you? I’ve got no cash.’
He handed over a crumpled ten pound note. ‘What are you, a member of the Royal Family?’
‘Back in two minutes,’ she promised him. She stared directly into his eyes. ‘Promise you won’t make a scene?’
She ran back down the street, and could hear him shout after her: ‘I expect change!’
The weather was killing business at the Tesco mini-supermarket. The shopkeeper’s badge told Gwen that she was Rasika. And Rasika looked grateful for her first and possibly only visitor of the morning, if surprised at what her customer bought.
Gwen showed Jack the four bags of groceries, holding them up like trophies. ‘OK, press the button for the flat below Wildman’s.’
He considered her shopping. ‘You got hungry?’
‘Six loaves of cheap bread and four jumbo boxes of cornflakes,’ she scowled. ‘Cheap and bulky. Looks like a lot, not too heavy, and cost nearly nothing.’
‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the change.’
‘Press the button, Jack.’
A querulous woman’s voice answered the call. ‘Yes?’
‘Tesco Direct,’ Gwen shouted at the speaker, and held up the shopping bags in front of herself so that the video camera could see them. ‘Bell’s bust for number nine. I could leave this lot on the step, but I’d rather bring it up out of this rain.’
The speaker made the sound of someone clattering a handset back into its cradle. Almost immediately, the door buzzer sounded.
Jack leaned against the green metal. The doors opened into a dingy hallway of grimy linoleum. There were two doors to the left, with two more opposite. A flight of steep steps rose into the darkness further down on the right. The hall was flanked by two scratched side tables, one covered in free newspapers and uncollected mail. Jack scanned the letters but found nothing for Wildman. He took a reading from the Geiger counter, but it ticked softly in the safe zone.
Gwen made her way up the concrete stairs. A detector registered her arrival and activated a bare bulb on the half-landing above. Through the big picture window she saw the rain drumming down on a back yard containing dustbins and a half-filled rusty yellow skip.
By the time she and Jack had reached the top of the next flight of stairs, an old woman had appeared around one of the doors on the landing. She had long, grizzled grey hair and a face to match. Gwen held up the bags and nodded in the direction of the next flight of stairs. ‘Thanks,’ she told the old woman cheerfully.
She looked Jack and Gwen up and down, considering their casual black attire and the water running off them on to the floor. Gwen watched where the drips were falling, and was aware that the gaudy linoleum on this landing outside the old woman’s apartment was scrubbed clean.
‘I can remember,’ replied the old woman in a measured tone, ‘when delivery drivers wore a uniform. But it’s all gone to hell these days, hasn’t it?’ And with this, she retreated into her apartment. Several security chains rattled as she secured them behind the closed door.
Gwen abandoned the four bags of cheap groceries at the top of the stairs, propping the bags against the railings. Jack scanned again for radiation, and was satisfied when he found the area uncontaminated.
Wildman’s apartment was one of two on this second floor. The door to number seven was painted in a cherry red that made a cheerful contrast to the other apartments that they’d seen so far.
‘Yale lock,’ Gwen told Jack. ‘Might be double-locked. But we know he’s not in anyway.’ She kept a look-out, watching for movement up and down the stairs, while Jack attempted to slip the lock.
‘Oh.’
Something had surprised Jack. Gwen looked over to see that he was pocketing his Geiger counter but drawing his revolver from its holster in his great coat. He mouthed ‘Door’s already open’ to her.
She reached for her own concealed weapon. Unlike Jack’s Webley, hers was a standard-issue Torchwood weapon. That meant non-standard anywhere else in the world, because their armoury issue was almost certainly augmented by alien technology. Jack was never particularly keen to explain to her exactly how, and she’d discovered that asking Toshiko about it was like requesting an invitation to a lecture on particle physics.
Jack pushed the apartment door open with his toe, and they both flattened themselves against the wall either side of the outer frame. There was no response from inside. Jack swung around, his legs braced and his Webley held in a double-handed grip.
From inside the apartment came a shrill scream and the sound of glass breaking.
‘All right, ma’am,’ Jack said, and stepped slowly through the doorway. ‘Stay calm. No cause for alarm.’
Gwen followed him into the apartment, noting that Jack did not lower his weapon.
A woman had pressed herself up against the striped wallpaper just inside the main room. Her brown eyes were wide, scared, unblinking. She couldn’t take them off Jack’s revolver. ‘Please don’t shoot,’ she begged in the voice of a schoolgirl, though she must have been in her mid thirties. ‘Please. Don’t hurt me.’
At her feet were fragments of a small, glass-topped table and the ornaments that had stood on it. The woman had overturned them in her fright when she first saw Jack. She was wearing sensible shoes, no tights, just tanned bare skin.
‘Room’s clear.’ Jack raised his voice so that Gwen could hear from her position in the narrow hallway behind him. ‘Stay back for a moment while I sweep the place.’
From her position in the hallway, Gwen could see Jack kick open doors to places off the main room. Bedroom, bathroom, saloon doors through to a kitchen area. Eventually he called to her that the apartment was secure.
Gwen moved into the room and holstered her weapon. The whole room looked like it had last been decorated in the 1970s. The same brown shag pile carpet appeared to have been fitted throughout, trampled to death over many years.
‘It’s OK,’ Gwen reassured the frightened woman. ‘We’re police. Special operations.’ She showed the woman her ID. ‘What’s your name, love?’
The woman seemed to slide down the wall as she relaxed a little. ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘Betty Jenkins.’ She had a South Wales accent. Swansea, maybe.
Jack was openly scanning the room with the Geiger counter. ‘I thought Tosh said Wildman was a sad bachelor with no life?’ He was examining items in the room. A
