Slow Decay

reckoned she needed a safe place to stay. Gwen had ducked the issue, making some sarcastic comment, and then she had started talking about the two of them and where they were going with their lives. Rhys was worried that she was winding herself up towards saying she wanted children, but fortunately her thoughts hadn’t got that far along the road to the future. She was just worried they were drifting apart. The spark just wasn’t there any more. He’d agreed, more because she was talking and he needed to throw in the occasional ‘Yeah’ and ‘I know’ to show that he wasn’t thinking about something else, but looking at himself in the mirror now he had a pretty good idea why they were drifting apart.

When was the last time they’d been out to a gig? When had they last gone clubbing? When had they last spent money on something frivolous, something that wasn’t for the flat or the car or dinner?

Somewhere along the way, they’d lost the fun.

He was turning into his father, that’s what was happening.

Taking a deep breath, he began running through a list of all the things that would have to change in the flat. Radio 2, for a start. That would have to go. He’d found himself tuning to it more and more, while cooking food or tidying up, but despite the catchy tunes and the humorous banter of the presenters, it would have to vanish from the radio’s memory. Radio 2 was the kind of thing he remembered his dad listening to. It wasn’t called ‘easy listening’ for nothing. Radio 1 from now on — or, even better, one of the cutting-edge broadcasters that had sprung up with the advent of digital radio. Something radical. Something that would make him feel young again.

The fridge would need some clearing. Get rid of all the milk and replace it with skimmed, for a start. Or, even better, that soya stuff. The bread would have to go: no more cheese on toast of an evening. All that pasta in the cupboard was now surplus to requirements. And he’d go out later and get lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. He and Gwen could revolutionise their eating habits overnight. No more takeaways, no more Indian restaurants, just salads and healthy living.

No more takeaways. No more Indian restaurants.

And no more beer.

That would be the killer, but that was what had led him to this state in the first place. He let his hand caress his belly. You’re going to have to go, my son. We’ve had some fun together, you and I, but if I need to sacrifice you to keep Gwen then that’s what I’m going to do.

A gym? They were expensive, and having now taken a long hard look at himself in the mirror, Rhys was reluctant to let anyone else see him in this state, sweating and panting on a rowing machine. There had to be another way. Football? Perhaps he could get together with a few mates and form a team, enter one of the amateur leagues. The daydream made him smile for a few moments, before reality came crashing in. How many men did he see on Sunday mornings down the park, running around a pitch for a few minutes and then stopping, hands on thighs, gasping for breath? Football didn’t seem to be doing them any good.

And then he remembered a snatch of conversation from the previous night. Lucy, talking about a diet clinic, and how the weight had just melted away from her. Something herbal, she’d said.

That was it. When Rhys got into work, he’d get the address of this diet clinic off Lucy, and he’d make an appointment.

The future suddenly looked very bright. Gwen didn’t know it, but Rhys intended to become a new man, just for her.

‘So which one of us is Ant, then?’ Owen asked. He spread the photographs out across the metal surface of the autopsy table, sliding them around as best he could until he had a two-dimensional representation of a dead Weevil, life-sized, made out of A3 close-ups.

‘Which one’s the straight one?’ Jack asked. He was prowling around the darkened balcony of the forensic lab like a tiger.

Owen thought for a moment, then swapped the photographs of the left and right hands over. ‘They’re both straight. Or they’re both funny, depending what you mean by “straight”.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m positive.’ He stood back, admiring his handiwork. He had to admit, in the absence of a real Weevil corpse it wasn’t at all bad. If he half-closed his eyes, it almost looked as if there was an actual body on the table. Not one that he could cut open, of course, but one he could examine minutely if he wished. Toshiko had offered to take several different digital images of the same areas and turn them into a 3-D virtual image, but there was something about the physicality of the images that appealed to him. It was a bit like looking at X-rays. The images were about the same size.

‘All right, which one’s got the most charisma?’

Owen thought for a moment. ‘Actually, they both look like Chuckie dolls.’

‘Chuckie dolls?’ Jack asked, still moving.

‘Evil plastic children’s toys turned serial killers.’

‘I must’ve been away that week. Jeez, you take a few days off with the flu and you miss an entire invasion attempt. I hope you guys wrote it up for the record.’

Owen glanced up at him to check whether he was serious or not, but this was Jack, and it was impossible to tell. He might have been serious; he might have been joking. He might have been both at the same time — Jack was like that. ‘Er… yeah, we wrote it up. Ianto has all the Chuckie dolls preserved in the Archive. Ask him about it.’

Jack was behind Owen now, looking down at the Weevil image. ‘Ant or Dec? Ant or Dec? Remind me — why are we choosing sides?’

‘For when these photographs get out on the Internet and we have to pretend that we faked them in order to discredit the whole thing. Like in the film.’

Owen could hear the shudder in Jack’s voice. ‘Jeez, I’m not going through that again.’

Owen looked up at him. ‘What — you were involved with that? Faking the Roswell footage?’

‘No, I meant I don’t want to go through seeing the film again. That’s two hours of my life I’d rather have dedicated to gargling rhino dung.’

‘Have you ever-’

‘Don’t go there.’

‘Watch me backing away.’ Owen walked around to the other side of the table and took a closer look at the Weevil’s half-eaten face, then tracked down the neck to the chest. It was hard to make out, but there were structures half-revealed through the tears in the flesh that bore no relationship to ribs. This was going to require a lot of careful study.

‘What about cause of death?’ Jack asked.

‘Little to add to what you spotted back at the warehouse. Something chewed on its face, neck and chest. The tooth-marks are clear on the flesh and on the bone — or at least what passes for bone in Weevils. I can do a plaster cast and a quick computer animation to tell you what kind of teeth, but I’m guessing it has to be something really quite frightening in order to subdue a young Weevil and chew its face away.’

‘Young?’

Owen nodded. ‘Barely out of its teens, judging by the size. If you put this one next to the one we have down in the cells, this would definitely be the lesser of two Weevils.’ He glanced up at Jack. ‘OK, moving on. The initial attack was quick, but I think it severed a major blood vessel — or the next best thing in Weevils. It bled out, while its attacker was still chewing away.’

Jack looked sceptical. ‘There wasn’t much blood at the warehouse.’

‘I know. I think the attacker drank most of it as it gushed out.’

‘You can tell that just from an examination of the body?’

‘No,’ Owen admitted, ‘I just have an active imagination.’

The police station was simultaneously familiar and alien to Gwen as she walked through the largest of the open-plan offices, surrounded by police officers busy filing reports and making calls, separated from each other by shoulder-high dividers. Familiar, because she had spent a couple of relatively happy years there, walking its institutionally painted corridors, smelling the bacon butties all the way from the canteen to the interview rooms, putting her street clothes in her battered grey locker at the beginning of every shift and getting them out again at the end. Alien, because it was all behind her now. She’d moved on. Grown up. It was like coming back to school after you’d left: you suddenly noticed all the little things you’d been used to before — the cracked paint, the battered corners on the corridors where trolleys of files had bashed into them, the coffee stains on the carpets. And