a tropical disease.’ He racked his brain for the name of some remote illness, the kind of thing that
‘Is that why I’m so hungry all the time? Is that one of the symptoms?’
‘Look,’ he said reassuringly, ‘the chances are you’re clean, but we need to be sure. If we’re wrong, it’ll make avian flu look like a joke.’
‘Avian flu
‘Yeah, but if it had, it would have been really serious.’
He took a deep breath. She wasn’t your normal Cardiff city centre good-time girl, this one. Sparky. If he’d met her in a bar, he’d have been tempted to chat her up and take her back home. Well, back to her home. ‘Look, do you know how many people died of flu in the great pandemic of the fourteenth century?’
‘Sorry, I was crap at history,’ she said. ‘But I was really good at biology.’
‘I bet. It was twenty-five million. About a third of Europe’s population at the time. These things can spread faster than Crazy Frog ringtones if they’re not checked.’
‘And that’s what you do?’ She looked him up and down. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a doctor?’
‘Aren’t you a bit young to be hanging around in bars accepting drinks from strangers?’
‘Point taken.’ She sniffed. ‘So what can I do to help? Apart from just hanging around in the cold and the damp?’
‘I need to conduct an examination, but I can’t come in the… unit… with you.’
‘OK.’ She started unbuttoning her blouse. ‘You want me to take everything off?’
‘Yes. No!’ Owen took a deep breath. Tempted though he was, if Jack caught him getting a girl to strip off in the cells, he’d be out on his ear. It had been bad enough last time it happened; he’d never talk his way out of it again. ‘No, I’ve got a kind of scanner thing. If I pass it through the food slot, you can wave it all over your body. It’ll take readings which I can analyse later.’
‘And it’ll work through clothing? I don’t mind taking everything off. You’re a doctor, after all.’
God help him. ‘Yes, it’ll work through clothing. You don’t have to take anything off.’
Owen reached into his pocket and took out his Bekaran deep-tissue scanner: slim and rectangular, with a lens arrangement set along one edge. It was essentially an ultrasound generator and detector, but Toshiko had modified it, reconfiguring the device to send its readings via wireless LAN directly to Owen’s terminal. But he didn’t really care
Owen knelt, and slid the device through the slot at the bottom of the door where pizzas had obviously been passed through to her. ‘Here. It’s switched on already. Just move it carefully along the outside of your clothes, as close to the skin as you can get. Try and make sure you cover everything.’
‘OK.’ She hesitated. ‘Look, I don’t want to seem critical, but if this is an isolation ward, and if I might be infected with something horrible, then why is that food slot left open? And why are there ventilation holes in this glass screen?’
Jesus. He was really having to work for this. ‘Positive pressure in the corridor,’ he said with as much confidence as he could muster. ‘The airflow goes into the… unit… not out. So I’m safe.’
‘Here goes,’ she said with trepidation. Holding the device above her stomach, she began to move it up her body.
Sour metal.
That was the first thing Gwen smelled as she pushed open the door of the flat. Sour, hot metal, like a garage where car parts were being welded together.
It was a smell she knew. Almost an old, familiar friend by now. The first time it had pricked her nostrils had been at three in the morning in a house in Butetown, where an elderly man had patiently used a hacksaw to cut through his left wrist, all the way to the bone and beyond. Gwen hadn’t seen the body — she’d been too junior for that, so she was just standing at the door, stopping anyone apart from the police and the coroner from going inside, but she remembered that smell, creeping down the stairs, and every time she smelled it now it put her back there, standing at the bottom of those uncarpeted stairs, listening to her colleagues trying to unstick the old man’s body from the bath. The next time had been in a squat in Ely, when a doped-up kid had whacked her in the nose with the heel of his hand as he tried to fight his way past her. The bleeding had stopped within ten minutes, leaving her lips and chin crimson and sticky, but she still had that flat, metallic taste in her mouth the next day. The times after that — too numerous to mention. The places were all different, the cause was always the same.
Gwen knew blood when she smelled it.
‘Rhys?’ she shouted, slamming the door into the wall and rushing into the hall. ‘What’s happened?’
Not even listening for an answer, she kept moving towards the living room. Rhys wasn’t there, but Lucy was crumpled on the floor, back against the sofa. Her alabaster forehead was marred by a massive bruise. By her feet, a spatter of blood marred the carpet.
‘Gwen?’ Rhys emerged from the bathroom, holding a tea towel to his cheek. The front of his T-shirt was bright red, the same colour as his neck, the same colour as the tea towel was turning where it touched him. ‘Thank Christ you’re back.’
She rushed to him and took his weight, feeling him lurch into her, supporting himself on her shoulders. ‘You need to sit down. Come on, let’s get you into the living room.’
Like competitors in some crazy three-legged race, they staggered together out of the hall. Carefully, Gwen let Rhys slip from her grasp, transferring his weight from her to the armchair, still keeping the tea towel clamped to his cheek. She stood over him, feeling like she’d come to a dead end, a junction where she wasn’t sure which way to turn.
‘I wasn’t expecting you back,’ Rhys murmured. His eyes were closed, his head resting on the back of the armchair.
‘Obviously,’ Gwen said. Her gaze clamped on Lucy, slumped on the floor a few feet away. She bent down to check the girl. Her pulse was strong in a throat that was so thin Gwen could see the throbbing of the blood in her arteries and the taut lines of the tendons distending the skin. She was unconscious, but breathing normally.
And there was blood on her lips: wet and smeared across her cheek. Gwen cautiously pulled Lucy’s lower lip downwards. Her teeth were bloodied as well, the blood outlining the gaps between them.
‘Rhys, what the hell has been going on here?’
‘We went out shopping for food, and Lucy started acting strange.’ Rhys kept his eyes closed as he spoke in a quiet, strained voice. ‘We came back, and she started coming on to me. I thought she was going to kiss me, and I tried to tell her not to, but she suddenly launched herself at me and bit my cheek. I pushed her away, but she just threw herself at me again. I pushed her away again, and she stumbled back and went arse-over-tit over the coffee table, hitting her head on the arm of the sofa as she went. I think she’s out cold. She’s still breathing, at least. I checked that before I went to sort my face out. I was just about to ring you.’
‘Let me look.’ Gwen reached out to take the tea towel. It was cold and wet. For a moment she thought that Rhys had been rinsing it under the tap in the bathroom when she arrived, but as she took it in her hand she realised it was too bulky, too cold. There was something inside: a packet of frozen peas.
Cautiously, Gwen peeled the cold tea towel from Rhys’s face. He hissed in pain, eyes clenched tight together. Strings of glutinous, clotting blood joined the towel to his face, but the damage wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. The cheek was more or less intact, but Lucy’s tooth-marks were clearly visible in Rhys’s flesh. It looked like she’d relaxed her grip when he pushed her back, rather than tearing his cheek off. He would live.
‘But why would she try and bite you?’ Gwen asked. ‘Apart from the obvious.’
‘I don’t think the obvious had anything to do with it. She was in a frenzy. The way her lips were drawn back, it was like a starving dog seeing a raw steak. I swear, Gwen, if she’d got a better grip she would have torn my cheek off and swallowed it whole, then come back for more. She would have eaten my entire face off if I hadn’t stopped her.’
