Slow Decay

Andy Lane. Slow Decay (Torchwood — 3)

To Dave, Alison and Jamie Trace,

for providing me with a Hub of my own in Plymouth

And dedicated to the memory of Craig Hinton

— best friend and best man

ONE

The sky was taking on the appearance of an old bruise as the sun slipped inevitably toward the Cardiff skyline. Yellows and purples were layered across it, each sliding into the other in a cascade of disturbed colour, like an Edvard Munch painting. Lights were beginning to come on across the city, in buildings and on streets, gradually replacing the actual city with a pointillist copy of itself.

The top of the tower block where Gwen stood was covered in weeds, moss and grass. The vegetation had drifted up, in seed or spore form, from the countryside beyond Cardiff’s suburbs. From where she stood, by the top of the stairway that led down towards street level and the rational world below, the far edge of the building was an impossibly straight cliff edge and the man standing there was poised on the edge of the void, coat eddying around him in the breeze like wings. Ready to fall or to fly.

‘Where can I get a coat like that?’ she asked.

‘You have to earn it,’ Captain Jack Harkness said without turning around. ‘It’s a badge of office. Like bowler hats in the Civil Service.’

‘They don’t still wear bowler hats in the Civil Service,’ she replied scornfully. ‘That went out back in the 1950s, along with tea trolleys and waistcoats. And I speak as someone who worked alongside loads of Civil Servants when I was in the police force.’ She caught herself. ‘I mean, when I was really in the police force, not just telling people that I’m in the police force to avoid having to tell them that I hunt down alien technology for a living.’

‘I bet they still wear them,’ Jack said. The wind ruffled his hair like a playful hand. ‘I bet when all the Civil Servants arrive in their offices in the morning they lock the doors, unlock their desks and take out their ceremonial bowler hats to wear where nobody else can see them. Like a kind of administrative version of the Klu Klux Klan.’

‘Have you got some kind of downer on the Civil Service?’

He still didn’t turn around. ‘In an infinite universe,’ he said, ‘there are undoubtedly planets out there where the entire population has grey skin, wears grey clothes and thinks grey thoughts. I guess the universe needs planets like that, but I sure as hell don’t want to have to visit them. I prefer the thought that if there’s a planet of Civil Servants then there’s also a planet where everyone has an organic TV set built into their back, and you can just follow people down the street, watching daytime TV to your heart’s content.’

The colour was slowly bleeding from the sky in front of Jack Harkness: yellows dissolving into oranges, oranges melting into reds, and everything dripping from the sky, sliding off the back of the night and leaving velvet darkness behind.

Gwen gazed at Jack’s back, trying once again to try and separate out the complex mess of feelings she felt for this man. When he talked about Civil Servants wearing bowler hats, it was almost as if he had only recently seen them. When he talked about alien planets, she could almost believe that he’d been to them. Almost. But that would have been mad. Wouldn’t it?

She wondered, not for the first time, how her life had managed to take such a right-angled turn without any warning. One day she was taking statements and guarding crime scenes whilst technicians in overalls scraped evidence up into plastic bags, and the next she was part of Great Britain’s first and last line of defence against… what? Invasion. Incursion. Infiltration. A whole bag full of words beginning with ‘In’, because that’s where things were coming. In — to her reality. In — to Cardiff.

And it was all because of this man standing on the edge of a roof twelve storeys above the ground. This man who had arrived in her life like a flash flood, drowning her in strangeness and adventure.

Impulsive. Impressive. Impossible. A whole dictionary of words beginning with ‘Im’.

‘Most people spend their time looking up,’ she said eventually, ‘looking at the stars. You seem to spend far too much time looking down. What are you looking for, exactly?’

‘Perhaps I’m looking for fallen stars,’ he said after a moment.

‘It’s the people, isn’t it? You just can’t help watching them.’ She caught herself. ‘No, that’s not it. You’re not watching them; you’re watching over them.’

‘Ever seen a two-year-old tottering around a garden?’ he said softly, without turning around. ‘There might be poison ivy, or rose bushes, or hawthorn around the edges. There might be spades or secateurs lying on the lawn. The kid doesn’t care. He just wants to play with all those brightly coloured things he sees. To him, the world is a safe place. And you might want to rush out and cut back all those sharp, spiky plants so they can’t hurt him, and you might want to clear away all those dangerous tools just in case he picks them up and cuts himself on them, but you know you shouldn’t, because if you keep doing that then he will either grow up thinking the world can never hurt him, or he might go the other way and think that everything is dangerous and he should never go far from your side. So you just watch. And wait. And, if he does get a rash from the poison ivy, or if he does cut his finger off with the secateurs, then you get him to hospital as quickly as you can, in the reasonably sure knowledge that he’ll never make that mistake again.’

Small points of light were appearing in the darkness beyond Jack. Within the space of a few minutes, it seemed to Gwen that he had gone from being a solid figure silhouetted against a slowly shifting backdrop of colour to a black shape against blackness, defined only by where the stars weren’t.

‘Is that what we are to you?’ Gwen asked. ‘Children?’

‘That’s all we are,’ he replied. ‘To them.’

‘And who are They?’

‘Who are They? They are the ones who live over the walls of the garden, in the wilderness outside. Me — I’m just a child as well, playing in the garden with the rest of you. The difference is, I’m just a little older. And I’ve already had my share of poison ivy rashes.’

Gwen gazed around at the top of the building, at the grasses and the weeds that occupied the spaces between the ventilation ducts and antennae, swaying gently in the evening breeze. ‘Life survives, doesn’t it?’ she said, apropos of nothing. ‘Finding little nooks and crannies to grow in. Putting down roots where it can, eking out some kind of existence in the cracks.’

‘And that’s what we do.’ The wind caught his coat, billowing it out behind him, but he seemed oblivious to the possibility of being blown off the building. ‘In Torchwood. We look for the things that have been blown in on the breeze between the worlds, and if necessary we eradicate them.’

Caught by a sudden premonition, Gwen looked at her watch. ‘Jesus! I’ve got a dinner appointment.’ She’d arranged to meet Rhys in a restaurant nearby — an apology of sorts for the amount of time she seemed to be spending away from him at the moment. Time she was spending with Jack. She turned to leave, then turned back, curiously unwilling to leave. ‘Are you coming down at all tonight, or are you going to stay here until dawn?’ she asked.

‘I’ll see how the mood takes me. How about you? Want to give dinner a miss and come join me on the edge?’

‘Thanks, but no. Gotta go.’

‘Just out of interest, why did you come up here in the first place?’

‘Oh…’ She racked her brain. It all seemed so long ago — the echoing space of the Hub, the conversation with Toshiko, the ride to the top of the building where she knew that Jack tended to hang out when he wasn’t with them — and now the memory was strangely obscured by the image of a muscular body and a huge coat wrapping itself