everything seemed so much smaller, and so much drabber.
‘You’ve got a nerve, showing your face around here!’
She turned, startled.
‘Mitch?’
‘Surprised you remember us, now you’re running with that Torchwood mob.’
She grinned. ‘I couldn’t forget you. We shared chips at three in the morning too many times for that. You’ve shaved your moustache off. You looked better when you had it.’
Jimmy Mitchell didn’t return the grin, or the banter. His face was set in a scowl that brought his heavy eyebrows together in a dark line and put a crease in the centre of his forehead. ‘Don’t try and sweet-talk me, Gwen. We know you removed evidence from the crime scene, and all we get told by the bosses is that we should proceed with the case with whatever evidence we have left.’
‘I promise you this, Mitch — whatever we took was incidental to your case, but vital to ours.’
‘Can I have that in writing?’
‘Bugger off.’ She smiled, to show there were no hard feelings. ‘What’s the story on the nightclub deaths, then?’
Mitch shrugged. ‘Looking like a self-contained thing. Five lads got into a fight and inflicted fatal wounds on each other. We’ve got all the weapons, including the broken bottles. Only thing is, we don’t know what they were fighting about. There were video cameras all over the club, relaying pictures to screens inside so the clubbers — narcissistic shits that they are — can see one another, and the management record everything just in case of trouble, but there’s nothing there to give us any clue. One moment they’re talking; the next minute they’re fighting; then they’re dead.’
‘Can you run me off a DVD copy of the video footage?’
He thrust his chin out pugnaciously. ‘Only if I can see whatever your people removed from the club.’
‘No way.’
‘That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.’
Gwen thought for a moment. ‘See, but not touch or take.’
He nodded. ‘I just need to make sure it’s not something we need to worry about — drugs, guns or stuff.’
‘It’s not. But I’ll bring it anyway. That cafe round the corner — the one that does the espresso strong enough to stand your spoon up in? Three o’clock?’
Mitch’s face relaxed slightly. ‘Look, kid — I know you’ve done good for yourself. Whatever Torchwood is, it’s got high-level cover. You people must be doing a phenomenal job. Whatever you hear, whatever we say, it’s not personal, OK? It’s just…’ He paused, groping for the right word. ‘It’s just jealousy, I guess. You turn up in your fancy car, with your fancy clothes, and you waltz into our crime scenes like you’re better than us.’
‘But isn’t that the same way you treat the Police Support Officers?’ Gwen asked.
‘Yeah, but we
‘No point. Can I have that DVD now?’
‘I thought we agreed on three o’clock!’
‘That was for the thing we took out of the club. I may as well take the DVD now, as I’m here.’
‘You don’t change, do you? You’re still a chancer. Wait here.’
He was gone for ten minutes, and while she waited Gwen read through the various Health and Safety bulletins that were pinned to the dividing boards. When Mitch returned, he was empty-handed.
‘I’ve set it up in the audio-visual suite. You can watch through it once, then take a copy with you. And you’ll have to sign for it.’
‘OK.’ The AV suite in the police station was high-quality: she would be able to zoom in on images, enhance details, and do most of the tricks that she could do back at Torchwood, with the added benefits that she’d get a little privacy — which was sorely lacking in the Hub — and foster a little more trust between her and her former colleagues in the police.
The AV suite was just a darkened office with a widescreen LCD TV and a rack containing various bits of video equipment: a region-free DVD player, VHS, Betamax and U-matic recorders, a tape recorder and a CD deck, and even a laserdisc player for some bizarre reason. The lads probably thought it took LPs. The idea was that it should be able to replay any recordable media the police took in as evidence, although Gwen remembered them once being foxed by an archive of illegal phone intercepts made, for reasons known only to the suspect, on 8-track tape.
The DVD was sitting on top of the rack, a silver disc in an unlabelled black box. She slipped it into the machine and called up thumbnails of the eight chapters it contained. The disc had been pre-edited by Mitch or his boys: one chapter for the pictures from each camera that had caught the incident as it swung back or forth. It took her forty minutes to go through every chapter twice, at the end of which she knew three things.
It was Craig Sutherland who had brought the device along to the club.
He was demonstrating it to his friend Rick by pointing it at something or someone out of the camera’s field of view.
And, seconds after Craig had demonstrated it, Rick had smashed a beer bottle on the nearest table and lashed out at a passing youth, slicing his face from eye to chin, leaving a gaping, bloody gash, horrifying even on the grainy video footage.
The rest was tragic and inevitable. The youth’s friends weighed in, arms rose and fell, blood spattered the nearby tables and walls. Gwen timed the action: from beginning to end, it took twenty-three seconds. It was a Grand Guignol of unimaginable savagery from kids, just kids, who had been talking and drinking peacefully just a few moments before.
It wasn’t her job. Not technically. It was up to the police to investigate the deaths, ascribe guilt and innocence and close the case. She didn’t live in that world any more.
But it was clear from the video footage that nobody else was involved. It was the closest thing to an open and shut case she’d seen for a long time, except for motive. And motive would get lost along the way. The deaths would be blamed on drugs, or cults, or gangs, or something. Once the police knew they weren’t looking for anyone else, they would wind the investigation down. Only Torchwood would know that the entire event, all five deaths, were due to kids using, or misusing, a piece of alien technology.
Toshiko was down on the firing range.
It was a darkened room, about fifty feet long and thirty wide, starkly illuminated by striplights suspended from an arched ceiling of old red bricks. A flat counter ran across the room at waist height, ten feet from the nearest wall. Partitions divided the bench into sections at which the Torchwood team would stand when they were conducting their regular firearms training, or when one of them was testing some suspected alien weapon they had found. On the other side the room was empty. The far wall contained a set of Weevil-shaped targets, some singed by laser fire and proton blasts, one still soggy from the time Owen had fired an alien fire extinguisher at it by mistake.
Toshiko was alone in the firing range. Alone, apart from two white mice.
One of the mice was in a small perspex cage on the bench, just in front of Toshiko. It was cleaning its whiskers with almost obsessive care. The other one was in another small perspex cage on a table in front of one of the distant targets. It was running up and down, sniffing at the corners and seams of its cage, stretching up to check the holes in the top.
Also on the bench, clamped in place so its longitudinal axis pointed towards each of the mice, was the lavender-coloured alien device.
Toshiko had two video cameras, one on each side of the room, recording her every move. One was set for long shot, the other for zoom. Jack wouldn’t miss anything… in case her experiment went wrong.
Somewhere in the Archive, there was a section devoted to the records left behind by other Torchwood members; ones who had been carrying out experiments, just as Toshiko was. Ianto had showed her where it was, once upon a time. Videos. Photographs. An ancient daguerreotype. And one scratchy old wax cylinder that, Ianto told her, contained a man’s voice talking very calmly up to the point when he suddenly let out the most God-awful scream that Ianto had ever heard.
Toshiko had no intention of only being remembered for the record of an experiment gone wrong. And even if she was, she wouldn’t be remembered for a scream. She would be remembered for the longest, loudest, most unexpected stream of profanities ever recorded by Torchwood.
Using a laser pointer, she lined the alien device up carefully with the two mice: one just a few inches away,
